


A Swiftly Falling Darkness

by tielan



Series: Chosen One [1]
Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: AU season 5, Action/Adventure, Drama, Gen, Post Season 4
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-05
Updated: 2012-03-05
Packaged: 2017-11-01 12:57:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 23,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/357050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tielan/pseuds/tielan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All around the world, someone is killing off the Slayers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Swiftly Falling Darkness

**Author's Note:**

> This is an AU from Buffy 7.22 ‘Chosen’ and Angel 4.22 ‘Home’ – everything in the Jossverse up to that point is concrete and solid. However, anything that is mentioned, referred to, or happening after those two episodes is all up in the air.

Late at night, on the streets of the city, the solitary girl should have been easy prey.

She walked past the mounds of rubbish and refuse littering the alley. Her bootheels tapped lightly against the concrete. Her movements were akin to the careless grace of a cat, both fastidious and yet unafraid of danger.

This was a dangerous area for humans, if she’d only known it. But her ignorance was to the benefit of the vampire who pressed himself up against the packing crates piled high in the shadows. The scent of her blood, flowing hot beneath her skin, had taunted him since she’d entered the alley, taking a shortcut from one main street to the next.

He’d survived the return of daylight to the city after the beast was destroyed. He’d eluded the surge of insanity following Jasmine’s appearance. Then, he’d managed to avoid the worst of the depression after she vanished.

Normality had returned and, with it, prey.

Including pretty little things with lovely, smooth skin, curling blonde hair, and sweet, red blood...

He should have stayed in place, waiting for the right moment to strike. But he was too hungry for the drink he could feel, intoxicatingly close. The vampire leaped from hiding with the easy viciousness of a killer, intending to bring her down to her death in the hard, cold street.

Even as he flew through the air, she moved with the preternatural swiftness of a predator, stepping out of his way and grabbing his arm as he passed by. His momentum swung them both around and down, and there was a crack as his jaw slammed against unyielding concrete.

He had time to yelp as he was flipped onto his back with hands too strong to be human, and then the girl was reaching into her jacket and pulling out something long and pointed.

Streetlight gleamed off a ring, flashing over the bright silver dolphin as the hand rose. There was time for the vampire to scream once as the stake plunged towards his heart, and then...

Silence.

The girl stood, dusting herself off with meticulous care. The light of the alleyway cast her face into chiroscuiro, the lines of her features visible through the long waving strands of her hair. She paused as she stood, and looked both ways like a child about to cross the road.

Then she walked with an easy saunter to the other end of the alley and vanished into the sparse flow of traffic.

Dust floated in tiny eddies of wind as shadows moved and coalesced into forms, barely visible against the backdrop of the night.

There was a sound like the faintest rustle of cornstalks. “This changes things.”

“No,” said another voice, dead and filled with rotting things. No living creature had a voice like that. “It does not. She will fight and she will die.”

“And another will come...”

“No other.”

The cornstalks rippled in the first voice, surprised by the certainty. “You are sure?”

Hints of curling copper made themselves known in the darkness as the second shadow shifted.

“I am.”

\----

It was nearly half-five when Angel was interrupted by his secretary.

_Nearly two hours since she last asked if I needed anything,_ he thought. _That’s almost a new record._

She walked into the room after a perfunctory knock and slipped a new wad of reports into his in-tray. “End of the day memos, Mr. Angel,” she said in a cool, slightly husky voice. “I’m about to leave. Would you like another glass of blood before I go?”

“No, thank you, Zanne. Please shut the door as you leave.”

Zanne did so with precise movements, no effort wasted. Angel glared at the door after she was gone.

His secretary got on his nerves. It was nothing she said or did - she was the perfect secretary, thoughtful, courteous, helpful. Angel just didn’t like her and her damned efficiency.

Maybe he’d just gotten too used to Cordelia’s haphazard methods of organising his office all those years ago.

Angel felt a pang of regret-sadness-anguish-anger at the thought of the vivacious brunette, now comatose and in the care of a bevy of trained nurses and specialists. He got a report on her condition every week, letters from the specialists on the new treatments they’d tried, ranging from the metaphysical to the magical.

So far, it didn’t look like there was anything that could bring a person back when a rogue Power-That-Be had taken the body over as an incubator.

Another knock heralded the secretary’s return. “Mr. Gunn to see you, Mr. Angel.”

From behind her, Gunn mouthed, ‘Mr. Gunn?’ He strode into the room, looking decidedly business-smart in his suit and tie, the whole ‘lawyer’ image completed by the file under his arm.

“Uh, thank you, Zanne. Have a good night.”

She nodded, “You too, Mr. Angel.”

And, turning on her heel, she left.

Angel noted how Gunn watched the secretary leave before turning back to him. Since his split with Fred, Gunn had become very open about admiring other women.

“If those heels were any higher, she’d be able to slam-dunk for the Lakers, you know?” Gunn grinned as he took a chair. “Nice ass, though.”

“I didn’t notice.”

“But you looked, didn’t you?” Gunn asked, a twinkle in his eyes. Then he regarded Angel a little more soberly. “Seriously, if she’s that irritating, why don’t you fire her?”

“She has a six-month contract in that role.”

The whistle was surprised. “Who got her to sign that?”

Angel knew his expression was sour. “Who do you think?”

“Lilah.”

“Lilah,” Angel confirmed. It was almost certainly a parting taunt from the dead lawyer; it had all the hallmarks of Lilah’s _modus operandi_. Pleasant and apparently helpful on the surface, but a neat little backslam beneath. “She might have had her uses...”

“If evil lawyerbitches are your type,” Gunn muttered.

“...but I’m not sorry she’s dead.” He could say that. Angelus hadn’t killed her, after all.

Gunn grinned, but tutted. “Just don’t say that around English.”

“Do I look like an idiot?” A finger pointed at Gunn even as his friend opened his mouth. “Don’t answer that,” he warned. “Why’d you come by tonight, Gunn?”

“I got orders,” the black man stated, stretching out in the chair, his hands folded low on his abdomen. “We’re going home in thirty, and we’re dropping in at a restaurant, a real, sit-down one, on the way.”

“Wesley’s idea?”

“He and Fred thought it up. Lorne’s with it. He was so eager to go, he nearly hung up on his client.”

Time out – even at a restaurant where Angel couldn’t eat the food – sounded good. Since they’d taken over the law firm, the former Angel Investigations gang had not had more than a couple of moments to themselves. The takeover wasn’t easy, even if it was entirely friendly. Each member had to be individually briefed on the state of their department and that took a fair amount of time.

And running a thousand-employee workplace was considerably more difficult than running a small business with six people. As Angel’s desktop was daily witness.

“I haven’t finished my work.”

“Haven't you learned that the work is never done around here?” Gunn asked. “Might as well just let it sit there another day. Or...wait!” He stood up and began shuffling through the ‘in’ tray contents, picking out specific documents. “Sign this...and this...and these...and _then_ let the rest sit there until tomorrow.”

Angel picked up the first one and read the subject line. A quick glance at the others showed the same thing: they were all from the Legal department. “Sneaky.” He leaned back in his chair and began reading through the docs.

“Hey, you’re here, they’re here, might as well bring ‘em to your attention.” Angel skimmed down the page, his eyes reading the lists of defendants for the week and the states of their cases, barely paying attention to Gunn.

He was aware the other man had gotten up and was moving about the office, but didn’t know exactly what he was doing until he looked up and found Gunn in a fighter’s stance, punching the air in front of him like a boxer against an invisible opponent.

“A little restless?” The man managing the Legal department of Wolfram and Hart was a far cry from the young leader of the gang of vampire hunters Angel had met four years ago. Angel knew there’d been a deal with the Senior Partners for the legal knowledge. He hadn’t asked exactly what Gunn had traded to change the streetwise boy into a shrewd legal eagle. It wasn’t presently something that worried him, although perhaps it should. And, judging by the punches Gunn was throwing, the mental exercise wasn’t quite taking the place of the physical exercise.

“Something like that. This place really needs a dojo.”

Angel initialled the first report Gunn had given him and tossed it to the side. “There’s a gym somewhere in the building.”

Gunn shrugged, “Yeah. Full of pretty white boys trying to make themselves look muscular.” Disdain oozed through his voice. “I want somewhere to _train_ , Angel, not develop showy muscles.”

“Maybe you should talk to someone about the lack of space,” The second report was initialled and tossed.

“I am.”

“Someone who can do something about it.”

“You can.”

“I’m the CEO of the company,” Angel corrected him, and held up the third report as he leaned back in his chair. “I sign off the reports. I don’t organise the building.”

“So who does?”

“There’s a building manager somewhere. I think. Fred had to go see him about rearranging the labs.”

“Oh.” Gunn glanced at the mess on the desk. “Got the office directory somewhere under that?”

While Gunn used the phone to contact the building manager, Angel swung back the thick curtains of his office to reveal the twilight-tinted cityscape. No smog tonight, just the brilliantly clear view of the high-rise buildings over the street and beyond, across the city.

He only opened the curtains after sunset. The glass was necrotinted, but Angel refused to take advantage of that.

That first morning, he’d pulled open the curtains for one, too-brief second. Sunlight had pierced his eyes, his body, his hands, his heart. The brilliance and beauty of it was as stabbing as any accusation of guilt, as any tears wept on his account or blood shed during his history. Angel had leapt back from the windows, back into the shadows.

After that first morning, he worked by the office lights only. No sunlight.

His friends said nothing about his preference for the dark. They probably thought he was just accustomed to the dark. In a way he was. Darkness hid his sins so much better than daylight.

Behind him, Gunn was arguing with the building manager, “...we really need all those meeting rooms? They’re not all used at the same time... What? Submit plans? You’re the building manager, it’s your job to deal with... Well, then send one of your guys over with some plans... Fine, then.”

The phone was slammed back into its cradle. “Sonovabitch.”

Angel didn’t turn from his contemplation of the city. “No dojo?”

“I’ll bring him around to it.” In the reflection of the windows, he tucked his hands behind his head and stared out at the city, the solitary inhabitant of the room.

Silence.

Around him, Angel could hear the distant murmur of voices on the phones in the offices to either side. Beyond his office and reception was the faint clatter of heeled shoes across polished floor, the distant ripple of voices rising and falling in cadences of speech, the tinny tones of a cellphone as it buzzed Beethoven’s ‘ _Ode to Joy_.’

The building was rarely silent. Even when the office workers had gone home for the night, the R&D department seemed to work on through the evening hours. More than once, Fred had arrived back at the house in the early hours of the morning, her delicate features tired but happy. More than once, Angel had heard one of their house-mates chewing her out the next morning for her long hours.

The door clicked open, and Fred peeked into the room before she pushed the door wide open. “Are you guys ready to leave? Wes called up and said he’ll meet us down at the limo – he got a call from someone in Europe and had to take it.”

Gunn spun about in the chair to face her, “Ready to go!”

Angel turned, his curiosity ignited. “Did he say who called?”

“No. He said he’d be down before long, though.” She leaned against the door frame, looking a little like a child playing dress-up in the suit she’d donned today for the departmental heads meeting. “I’m really looking forward to dinner. We haven’t been out to dinner in...”

“A very long time,” Lorne announced behind her. “Fred, my dear, dare I hope that you picked somewhere that serves demon clientele? Or am I going to have to languish in the limo while you kids dine on caviar and champagne?”

“I don’t know where we’re going,” Fred admitted. “Wesley was the one who organised it. But he said something about a new restaurant in town that caters for a broad range of customers.”

“Including demons?”

“I’m sorry, Lorne, I didn’t think to ask.”

“I guess we’ll find out soon enough, sweetpea.” Lorne turned to Gunn and Angel, “Well, since Wesley has gone to all the trouble of booking a restaurant that probably serves green-skinned demons, _are_ we going to make a move towards dinner any time soon?”

“Wesley’s taking a call,” Angel said, crossing to the phone and pressing a button that would let the chauffeur know to have the limo ready to go. “He’ll meet us downstairs.”

“Taking a call at this hour?” Lorne rolled his eyes and adjusted his tie. “Can anyone say workaholic?”

“He’s not the only one in the office until this hour,” Gunn said pointedly, as he sauntered towards the door, picking up his file along the way.

“Sweetcakes, I'm not the one with 'lawyer' tattooed over his ass,” the green-skinned, red-horned demon retorted.

"How do you know what I've got tattooed on my ass, anyway?"

Angel began tidying his desk, listening to the easy bickering of his two friends as they wandered out into the corridor. Fred remained where she was, at the door.

He glanced up to find her soft brown eyes resting on him, thoughtfully. “What?”

She took her time in answering. “You’ve been very quiet lately. I mean, you’re always quiet. But now you’re even quieter. It’s as though...something went missing and you haven’t yet found it.”

Long years of practise at dissembling and lying helped him keep moving instead of freezing up at her words.

Yeah, he was missing something.

He was missing his son.

It ached, especially since Connor was in LA. So close, and yet he might as well be a thousand miles away.

Angel had gone to see him once, going into the campus at night and following Connor’s scent. He’d found him so easily, walking back to his dorm with a bunch of friends, grinning at the jokes the others told. The sight had been like a red-hot poker speared through Angel’s stomach. Connor was no longer the haunted, driven boy whose childhood had been stolen, first by Wesley, then by Holtz, and finally by Cordelia, Jasmine, and even Angel himself.

Connor got to be what he should have been in the first place: a normal young man without a care in the world beyond his next set of exams.

Angel didn’t regret the bargain.

It was worth it to see Connor happy – truly happy.

What was one more burden on Angel compared to that?

More than anything else, it was the secret of Connor that was contributing to his distance from his friends. So much of their history together was bound up in Angel’s son: in his kidnapping, in his return, in the conflicts he’d brought with him into their midst...

And he couldn’t talk to them about it.

Fred was still watching him, earnest and concerned. He managed a smile for her. “Just the stresses of running Wolfram and Hart,” he told her, regretting the lie, but accepting the obligation willingly. For Connor’s sake. “Maybe once I get used to it...” He trailed off, suggestively, and indicated the door, hoping to take her attention elsewhere. “Shall we go, before Lorne starts singing?”

She laughed and preceded him out of the office.

Downstairs, they found Wesley already sitting in the limousine, looking grim.

“That’s one long face,” Gunn commented as he settled himself opposite Wes, “Can’t be good news.”

“It’s not,” Wes replied, shortly. He seemed older tonight, bone-weary as he waited for the others to get into the vehicle. “I received a call from Giles. Someone’s killing off Slayers in Europe.”

Angel glanced sharply at the Englishman as the limousine moved smoothly away from the kerb, sudden fear spearing through him. “Buffy?”

Buffy might not want him in her life, and Angel might have created himself a world without her, but that didn’t mean he didn’t still care. They were just on different paths now.

“She and Dawn are both fine. However, two girls in Western Europe are not.” He looked grim. “Giles says the bodies were mutilated in similar fashions. Another four girls are missing – spread out across Eastern Europe and across into the Middle East.”

“Mutilated?” Lorne shook himself with a slight shudder and held up one green-skinned hand. “Don’t tell me how. There are some things I don’t need to know before dinner.”

“Giles said, and I quote, ‘It’s just about the most horrible thing I’ve seen in my life.’”

It was bad, then. There couldn’t have been much the Watcher hadn’t witnessed during his years on the Hellmouth – including finding his girlfriend in his bed with a broken neck, courtesy of his Slayer’s ex-boyfriend.

Some horrors could never be forgiven.

“Do they know why the girls were...” Fred paused, wincing, “...killed?”

“No. Not yet. Giles wished to know if the same thing has been happening here in America, or if it’s confined to Europe. I couldn’t tell him.”

“Haven’t heard anything,” Gunn said, glancing around at the others. “Of course, it’s a big country.”

“We can run a search for coroner’s reports on mutilations,” Fred suggested. “It shouldn’t be too difficult...”

“Aren’t there a couple of them up in Cleveland or something?” Gunn asked

As the others discussed ways to find out if any of the American Slayers had gone missing, Angel found his attention drawing away from his friends, to Europe – and Buffy.

Dawn sent him postcards from everywhere they travelled. She also had a ‘blog’ that was, apparently, some kind of diary on the Internet in which she recorded what happened from day to day. Angel didn’t like computers. Whenever information like that was required, he’d left the operation of the computer to Cordelia. These days he got his secretary to do searches for him. He could never remember how to find Dawn’s ‘blog’ either, although Willow had sent him detailed instructions.

But if Dawn was talkative about her European adventures, Buffy was silent. Angel hadn’t heard from her at all. Any information about her was second-hand, through Dawn. Or, in this case, through Giles.

He used his imagination a little though. Buffy would probably love Europe. He could imagine her loving it. The ancient splendours of the cities, quaintly packed together, as unlike the American suburbia in which she’d lived the last seven years as possible.

The streets of LA slid past his eyes. Angel never saw them.

He was seeing Europe again.

Angel remembered the hollow expectancy in the air as he stood in a chapel in Constantine, admiring the artwork of some third-century sculptor. He recalled the crisp, biting night air of the Swiss alps, and the picturesque look of the villages, so sweetly gingerbread. He thought of the spicy breathlessness of Madrid at the time of the running of the bulls, dark-haired girls flirting with him as he sat in the shadows.

He remembered the blood and the screams, the fear and terror, and the death and the dying.

Angelus had made a name for himself in Europe. Every city held memories of the pain and suffering of his victims. He’d revelled in the cultural beauty of Europe and revelled in the decadence of his own malevolence. He’d slaughtered innocents like cattle, drank their blood like it was fine wine.

Angel had little desire to remember Europe.

Which was exactly why Angel had left Europe behind to come to America – to seek a new world, a new start. There was no way Angel could escape the memories Angelus had made, no way he could deny what he was, deep beneath the exterior casing of Angel. He could feel the demon inside him hungering again and again, the dark voice that lurked in his subconscious and occasionally broke through to glory and hunger and rage in his consciousness.

So Angel had lived like a pauper, merely existing, without purpose or drive. Life was lost to him, and living was impossible with the guilt that woke him every night, fresh bloodstains on his memory.

Then, one day, Whistler pointed Buffy out to him, and Angel learned about living for someone else’s sake.

He didn’t learn about living for his own sake until he left Buffy in Sunnydale and came to LA.

“Angel?” Wes’ voice broke into his thoughts, and he glanced around, finding everyone watching him with varying degrees of concern written on their faces.

“Sorry. Just thinking.”

“Watch out world, here comes Mr. Broody,” Gunn said, matter-of-factly.

Angel ignored him. “What was the question?”

“I was asking if you’d heard from Faith lately,” Wes said, with a touch of impatience. “Giles said she went northeast after the battle against the First, but they haven’t heard from her since.”

He’d heard from her once. The letter had been delivered to the Hyperion, messily addressed and posted from a town just beyond Sunnydale. It had arrived just after the Sunnydale Hellmouth collapsed, just after they’d taken control of Wolfram and Hart. “Uh...I heard from her while we were still moving out of the Hyperion. It was pretty short.”

In fact, it had contained nothing more than a couple of scrawled lines in an untidy hand.

_‘In once piece, going travelling with a friend for a while. Stay shady. Faith.’_

That had been... Angel counted the weeks and was surprised to realise they’d moved out of the Hyperion just over two months ago.

“She didn’t say where she was going, just that she was going to be travelling around.”

“So she could be anywhere.”

“Faith’s clever,” Fred offered, looking from Angel to Wesley.

“She’s a Slayer,” Gunn added. “That would count for something, right?”

Angel and Wes exchanged glances. They knew quite well that Slayers were only human, prone to all the failings of humanity.

“It would,” Lorne said with the knowledgeable air of a demon who’d studied his lore. “Against vampires and your standard evil demons, that is.” He began to rummage in the limousine fridge. “I’m guessing this thing that captured and killed those Slayers is pretty powerful. Or pretty sneaky to get five of them. Schnapps, anyone?”

Wes shrugged, “I only know what Giles told me and it wasn’t much. They’re looking into the problem, and he asked if we could run a check on the Cleveland Hellmouth. Willow and a few of the other girls went there after Sunnydale collapsed. They might have an update on the location of most of the other Slayers.” He fell silent, staring into a space in the middle of the car.

Wesley didn’t need to mention that it was largely Faith he was worried about. Angel understood. Once a Watcher, always a Watcher – even expelled from the Council. And, since Wesley had been the one to break Faith out of jail last year, he probably felt responsible for her safety.

Angel felt responsible for Faith’s safety, too. He’d place a few calls in the morning, use Wolfram and Hart contacts to determine where she’d last been seen. The network of information the law firm commanded kept an eye out for the supernatural and unusual. A girl like Faith was unlikely to keep a low profile wherever she was. She’d be easy enough to find.

“It’s...what? Ten in Ohio?” Gunn asked, loosening his tie. “Probably too late to call them now. They’d be out on patrol.”

“And Willow has our numbers if something comes up they can’t handle.” Fred added, glancing at Wes. Her regard got Wes’ attention as little else could have.

“Yes,” Wesley conceded, “I suppose she does.” He favoured Fred with a slight smile and she smiled a little but looked self-consciously away. Angel didn’t ask. He didn’t need to know – not really. Their relationship wasn't his business, anymore than Gunn and Fred’s relationship had been his business.

In the space of two weeks, Angelus had caused enough trouble among Angel Investigations to last them a lifetime. Causing rifts. Talking about things they didn’t mention. Telling them about things they’d kept secret.

Angel saw a lot of things, and Angelus had used that knowledge without mercy on Angel’s friends.

Thank the Powers That Be that Wes had thought to use Faith to bring Angelus in.

Faith, who was out of jail and in parts unknown. Faith, who might already be dead or dying in the hands of whoever had taken the European Slayers.

Angel had a sinking suspicion that it wasn’t a question of _when_ the US Slayers would start dying off, but a question of _how many_ of them were already dead.

He hoped Faith wasn’t one of them.

“Faith will be okay,” he said, as much to reassure himself as Wes. “She’s a survivor.”

\----

She was surviving, but barely just.

_If I have to serve one more table of screaming kids,_ Faith decided as she passed the ‘family’ of four year olds at table seventeen, _I’m going to pick up a knife and slaughter the lot of them._

The thought brought her a guilty stab of pleasure. Violent instincts were hard to let go, as she’d repeatedly told Angel during his visits. He’d said he understood exactly what she meant. But she’d bet he’d never had to work all day in a diner full of assholes - both customer and staff - and keep a ‘happy smile’ on his face ‘because we pride ourselves on being pleasant!’

Pleasant was the last thing she felt after a night spent patrolling solo. No Scoobies, no Watchers, no Robin, just her and Mr. Pointy.

She made her way back to the kitchen where the grumpy cook was churning out the orders with precious little regard for hygiene. Faith worked here. She _didn’t_ eat here.

Pots clashed and pans clattered as he slammed them down, in a mood that matched her own. “Orders for number twelve,” he ground out. “And don’t break the plates this time!”

“It wasn’t like I did it deliberately the first time,” she said, sullenly. Those plates would be coming out of her pay – and there wasn’t all that much of it anyway.

Her nerves were just worn enough that she’d forgotten her own strength and snapped two plates this morning while taking meals to customers.

This time, she held the plates as though they were expensive china instead of cheap dishware. Slayer strength might be a great thing when dealing with vamps, but it could be a bitch when you were tense and tired and forgot that porcelain was very easy to snap between your thumb and first two fingers, no matter how ‘sturdy’ it was supposed to be.

Table twelve was in the corner; a bunch of college boys. They’d become regulars over the last couple of weeks, coming in every few days to eat lunch, although she’d seen a couple of them at breakfast one morning. They made lewd comments about her when they thought she couldn’t hear.

Faith ignored them as much as possible, although she really wanted to throw each and every one of them through the window and out into the street beyond.

“Two chicken fried steaks, one hamburger no cheese,” she said as she put them down in front of each of the boys and addressed the last two. “Your orders are on their way.”

When she returned, two of the guys had already hoed into their food, the third was talking to the fourth, and the fifth...

The fifth boy was watching her.

It wasn’t a smirking or sneering look. It was a calm, measured gaze, the pale eyes slightly narrowed as he studied her, lips caught in something that wasn’t quite a smile.

This one she didn’t remember from the previous visits. The other four were familiar, this one was a new inclusion, and she slid her eyes over him as if he was unimportant. “One lasagne, one battered fish. Enjoy your meal.”

She turned on her heel and went over to the register, taking a moment to lean on the counter and sigh. Another four hours on this shift and she could go home and get some sleep. God, sleep. She’d almost forgotten what that felt like.

Right now, she wasn’t getting much of it.

_Isn’t there some song about sleeping when you’re dead?_

At the rate she was going, she’d be dead much sooner than she anticipated.

How long had it been since she’d gone slaying without someone to back her up? Years. She’d forgotten how hard it was.

LA was the big city. The vampires were everywhere, itching against her senses like a rash she could never be rid of.

It was impossible to believe that in one of the largest cities in America, she was the only Slayer.

It was impossible to believe that the vamp population of LA could be so damn endless.

It was impossible to believe that Angel and his crew were gone.

The Hyperion was empty. Abandoned. When she broke in to check things out, the rooms were ransacked, the office files gone. The goons at Wolfram and Hart were her guess for the perps. Faith wouldn’t have put it past them.

In the absence of the people she’d hoped to find, she’d cleared out one of the rooms on the first floor and was using it as a base. It beat paying for a motel room, and she didn’t make enough at this shitty job to sleep under a roof _and_ eat.

A shitty job that included screaming kids.

Another round of screeches lanced into her brain like the metal spikes for which William the Bloody had been named. Her teeth gritted in pain and she fisted her hands into balls.

The other waitress brushed a hand over her shoulder as she passed. “Could be worse,” she murmured, trying to be sympathetic. “Ian nearly pulled this shift.” Ian was a first-degree asshole. You could stake vampires – but there wasn’t much you could do about the bastard managers of seedy diners, except bite your tongue, resist the urge to punch his lights out, and fix a smile on your face as you went to serve the next set of customers.

Faith managed a return smile for the girl. Hayley wasn’t too bad. Practical and down to earth. At least she wasn’t like some of the other airheads who occasionally worked this shift. “Lucky us.”

“Oh yeah...” Hayley rolled her eyes and went to get the next set of meals for her side of the diner. Faith grimaced, rolled her head around to loosen the stiff muscles of her neck, and ignored the eyes she could feel burning into her back.

She didn’t look around. Why encourage him?

Men looked at her. Faith counted on it. There’d been a time when she enjoyed their gazes, whether admiring or disgusted. She got them under the skin, at the bone, in the balls – and she loved it.

Not so much anymore. Not since jail and the break-out. The break-out which still worried her a little. Technically, she was on the lam. LA was hardly safe for her.

Still, she was the Slayer. _Nowhere_ was ‘safe’ for her.

“Kiddie Korner is waving at you,” Hayley muttered as she passed by the register. “Better go see what the grommets want now!”

Faith fixed a smile on her face, hoped it didn’t look too much like a grimace, and went to see what she could get the brats. Hopefully the check. Or maybe some eternal peace? Hey, a Slayer could always hope.

An hour and dozens of meals, desserts, and drinks later, the place was almost empty but for an ancient dodderer who was slowly chewing through his fillet steak. Personally, Faith was amazed the geezer had the teeth to chew the meat. His mouth had seemed more gappy than toothy.

Faith wearily cleared away the dishes and glasses from the now-empty tables, taking them back to the kitchen.

“You getting lazy with the cleanup, Faith?” The cook was in an absolute stinker of a mood. He was going to pick a fight today if it was the last thing he did.

Faith wasn’t in the mood for a fight. Verbal fights would only turn into physical ones and physical ones would involve throwing him through the back door – while it was still shut.

“Working as fast as I can,” she defended herself.

“Work faster, then!” Never mind that they had no customers left but the old guy.

She didn’t tell the cook where to shove it. She didn’t beat him black and blue with his own frying pan. She didn’t do any of the things she thought she’d like to do, including showing him the five torture groups until he was quite familiar with all of them.

Instead, she stalked out and went to clean up after the college kids.

Her thoughts were on taking a breather out the back, having five minutes to lean up against a wall and squeeze in a quick powernap. So she didn’t notice the odd crackle of one of the bills she slipped into her pocket from the tips the boys had left. In her room in the deserted Hyperion, she pulled out the money she'd made that day in tips and found a scrap of paper crumpled up among the bills.

Her fingers tingled, pregnant with possibilities as she uncurled it and read the four words there.

_You are the Slayer._

\----

It was late afternoon before the packet was delivered to him.

First, there was the translation which engrossed him until Fred called up and reminded him it was lunchtime.

Then, there was the hour he spent during lunch listening to her and Knox converse in a language Wesley considered as arcane as any demon tongue: technobabble.

Finally, there was the translation that no longer engrossed him, mostly because he couldn’t work out if ‘ _kurakhi’_ translated to ‘desire’ or just ‘hunger’ and in his state of mind, he couldn’t see that there was much difference anyway.

So when the mailboy came around with a thick package, express-delivered from Hamburg, Germany in Giles’ angular scrawl, Wesley grabbed it and took it down to Angel’s office.

His interest in the Texan girl wasn’t going anywhere, not with the kind of time and energy she was putting into her work here at Wolfram and Hart. Especially not when she was spending all those hours with a younger, more technologically-minded guy who seemed to be just as enamoured of the Texan as he was of his geekdom.

But Wesley's restlessness wasn’t just to do with Fred.

The knowledge that there was something out there killing Slayers brought out instincts that would never be fully buried. Part psychological-profile, part cultural encouragement, Watchers had highly-protective instincts towards the girls who were chosen to spearhead the fight against the vampires and demons of the world.

Those instincts were doubled when it came to a Slayer to whom a Watcher was bound by blood and duty.

A Slayer such as Faith.

You didn’t lose that, even after five years out.

In the corridors of the firm, people greeted him with nods and calls of ‘Good morning.’ The old gang from Angel Investigations was well-known – if only by reputation. Wesley nodded at them and kept walking, not in a mood for small talk.

At Angel’s office, the secretary glanced at him, almost as if she expected him to have an appointment. Not likely. He walked past her, rapped twice on Angel’s door and walked in.

Angel was on the phone.

“So you’re sure none of them...”

Wesley pointed back outside towards the secretary’s office, but Angel shook his head. “Hang on a minute, Willow, Wesley’s here. I’ll try to...um...put it on the speaker thing...” His hand hovered uncertainly over several buttons before he pressed one. “Uh...Willow?”

Nothing. He pressed the handset to his ear. “I don’t know how... Oh, wait...” He reached out and pressed another button and suddenly the slightly breathless voice of the red-headed girl filled the office.

“...that you can press and that turns it into...”

“It worked,” Angel said, as he put the handset back.

“It did? Oh, of course, it sounds all different, now. Kinda like deep, empty caves... Is Wesley there?”

“Good afternoon, Willow.”

“Hey, Wesley. How’s things in sunny LA? I tried to ask Angel, but he only knows about shady LA.”

A smile tilted one corner of his mouth, reluctant, but helpless. “Sunny LA is...sunny.”

“Oh well. Sun is good. Sun is always good. No rains of fire?”

“No. Thank goodness.”

“No rains of fire here, either. Although, we have this hellmouth that’s been burping a bit lately. It makes for unnerving stuff,” Willow said, a little breathlessly. “But we’re handling it.”

He smiled in spite of himself. Willow would always sound like the bookish, uncertain girl to him, no matter how old or powerful in magic she became. “I’m sure you are,” he said warmly. “Did Angel tell you about what’s happening in Europe?”

“No. Giles called us last night – he told us about the dead Slayers.” Her voice was briefly revolted, before she continued in a more normal tone of voice. “Angel said you guys are looking for Faith. She and Principal Wood came with us to Cleveland, but they left for New York and Boston after a week. They were going stay in touch...”

“...but they never did.” Wesley frowned. It was almost reassuring to know that the young rogue Slayer had not changed at all in some aspects, at least. “Do you trust this Principal Wood?”

“Robin? He’s the son of a former Slayer. Umm...Nikki Wood.”

It took Wesley a few minutes to process the name. Then he stared. “The one Spike killed?”

“That’s the one. Faith’s okay with him. Probably more than okay. They were getting on very well when they left us. I hope they’re still alive.”

“So do we, Willow,” Wesley told her, truthfully. “So do we.”

“You’re not missing any Slayers?”

“None of the ones we know of. We’re keeping an eye out for anything odd here in Cleveland, and I’m checking the latest police reports of nearby cities to see if there’s anything happening there.”

Wesley remembered the package and brought it up. “I actually came to bring this over,” he tossed the packet to Angel. “From Giles.” And, speaking of Giles... “Has Giles located the new Slayers called?”

“There aren’t any new ones being called,” Willow reported. “I performed a finding spell on new Slayers last night. Nothing. Of course, we don’t know what enabling all those Slayers did to the balance of everything. I mean, we might have stripped the future of Slayers for all we know, because there aren’t any potentials left now that they’ve all got Slayer powers. But nature abhors a vacuum and I thought that maybe once the potential got turned into Slayers, more potentials would appear. And I’m talking too much again, aren’t I...?”

The smile that turned up his mouth was gentle. It was bizarrely comforting to know that her time spent as absolute evil had not changed some essentials of her character. “So you think the line of Slayers is ended?”

“I was hoping you’d know, being an ex-Watcher and all.”

His thoughts took a moment to gather, winnowing through the chaff of his memory. “Are you sure there are no new Slayers?”

“As sure as I can be with the spell Giles sent me through Dawn’s email.”

Wesley thought fast. The Council had possessed a spell to identify a new Slayer when she was called. How Giles had got hold of it, he didn’t know, but he was impressed. It was said to be a closely-held secret.

Angel was struggling with the letter and the letter opener, which, Wesley noted, was a silver-chased, Shorshach ceremonial knife. “Willow, I’m afraid there’s no telling what the result will be of your turning the potentials into...” Wesley stopped as Angel pulled out the contents of the envelope and he caught a glimpse of what had made Giles so grim over the phone last night. “Dear God...”

Slowly, Angel pushed the photos out across the desk surface, laying them out with a marked care, as though his delicacy could make up for the brutality displayed in their contents.

The bloody wrecks in the photos had once been human girls. The youngest one might have been twelve. Maybe. Judging by the way their lips shrunk back in endless screams amidst their blood-daubed bodies, their deaths had been slow and painful.

Wesley sternly told his lunch to stay put, and tried to do the same with the instincts rising hot and deadly to the surface.

He’d been trained as a Watcher; trained to look after and look out for the Slayer so she could do her job. He hadn’t done all that stellar a job while he _was_ a Watcher, but looking at these girls, he couldn’t help the wave of rage and anger that flooded his body and mind.

Who’d been looking out for these girls? Who’d been watching over them when they were captured by their enemy, tortured and slaughtered as though they were nothing more than cattle?

He sucked in a harsh breath.

“Wesley? Angel?”

“We’re okay,” Angel answered with a glance at Wes. “Giles sent us photos of the European Slayers they found.”

“Oh,” Willow sounded subdued. “How bad is it?”

“Bad,” Angel replied. He looked paler than usual

“Can...can you send us a fax? Or even a digital photo...”

Wes found his voice, “Willow, I don’t think...”

“Ultimate evil, Wes, remember? I’m not a stranger to the nasty stuff...”

Angel interrupted. “Willow, this is bad... Angelus bad.”

For a moment, the men thought they’d convinced her. Then she spoke, and while the voice was still distinctly Willow, the inflections sounded different – as if there was an echo of the abyss.

“Angel, I’m on the second Hellmouth in eight years after spending my whole life on the first. I went evil two years ago, flayed a man alive and tried to end the world. I’m in charge of five slayers who could end up dead, and I’m not seventeen anymore...” Her voice softened, “I need to know this.”

They exchanged glances, torn between protecting her and the truth of her words.

Finally, Angel said, “I’ll have my secretary courier them to you later today, Willow.”

“Thank you. I’ll have the girls do some checking of morgues and coroner’s labs. If the...uh...bodies are going to turn up anywhere it’ll be in there.” Willow sounded as though she was expecting them to object.

Neither did. The girls had battled the First, seen their comrades die before their eyes. They already knew life was fragile. As warriors for the Powers, they deserved to know what might be their fate if they weren’t lucky.

The two men didn’t like it, but they weren’t fools.

“We’ll do the same out here,” Angel said.

“And I just had a thought relating to Faith,” Willow added. “When Buffy died, no new Slayers were called - right? Now, with all these potentials-turned-slayers dying, there aren’t any new slayers being called.”

Hope was a fragile thing. Delicate, and yet so powerful.

“It might be that there can only be one Slayer-rebirth line,” the young woman continued. “And Faith’s it. Which means that new Slayers aren’t being called...”

“...because Faith’s still alive,” Angel finished off for her.

“I mean, it doesn’t locate her,” Willow sounded apologetic, as if she hadn’t just given both men a sudden infusion of hope, “And it’s not certain. But none of the other dead girls had Slayers called after they died, and it makes a kind of sense. We’ll probably have to check if there are new potentials happening, but I guess it’s better than nothing at all.”

They matched gazes. “It is,” Wesley said, relieved at the possibilities. “And we’ll get our resources to looking for Faith.”

“You should be able to do very well with all the dark and evil forces of Wolfram and Hart at your command,” Willow said, teasingly.

Again, their eyes met, dark to blue. The Sunnydale gang seemed to either look upon their takeover of Wolfram and Hart as a big joke or a mistake waiting to bite them in the ass. Rather than respond to her comment, they promised to keep her apprised of the situation, and she hung up after extracting an additional promise from Angel about the photos.

The photos.

Wesley forced himself to reach out and spread the dozen or so photos across the desk. He made himself look at the ruin of bodies, faces, spirits. Blood streaked, dark and ugly; skin peeled, red and raw; mouths gaped, open and painful; these girls hadn’t just been killed, they’d been massacred.

“Not just dead, but tortured,” he muttered. “Why?”

Angel was reading through some sheets of paper, a coroner’s report. “A sacrifice of some kind?”

Dark shadows marked points on the hands and skin of the girls and Wesley picked up the nearest photo the better to study it. Was that...?

“Angel, this girl was pierced through the wrists and the feet.”

Angel looked up, dark eyes grieving, “All of them were. The coroner found splinters of wood in their backs, and hemp threads around their arms.”

“Crucified? Like a religious symbol...” Wesley muttered. He looked back at the dead girl’s face in the photo, and for a moment, the profile blurred. He put the sheet down, swiftly and rubbed his eyes.

“They’re not easy to look at,” Angel said.

It wasn’t looking at the corpses that was getting to Wesley. It was the fact that every single one of them was suddenly Faith looking back at him with reproachful eyes.

He didn’t mention that to Angel. Instead, he inquired, “Have you tried the New York branch?”

“This morning. They said they’d call back when they had information.”

Which effectively meant, ‘ _Forget it_.’

The good part about being in control of Wolfram and Hart’s LA branch was that they had near-unlimited resources in this corner of the country. The downside was that most of the other branches spread out across the globe were barely civil at the best of times.

“We had contacts in New York before we started working here,” Wesley said thoughtfully, already making mental lists of people they could call up and ask to check if there was word about a Slayer on the streets.

“Then we’ll use them,” Angel pulled open a drawer and began rummaging through it. After a moment, he shut it and began on the next drawer down. Again, nothing. “Damn. I swear that secretary goes through my drawers and ‘organises’ everything...”

Angel seemed to be making a habit of complaining about his secretary. Wesley glanced back at the closed door into the office antechamber. “If you find her that annoying, why don’t you...”

“Six month contract.” Angel said shortly as he pulled out what looked like a couple of black books and kept fishing around in the drawer. He glanced up at Wesley, as though it was his fault. “Lilah got her to sign it.”

“Oh.” He almost winced.

Almost.

His affair with Lilah was still a sore point between him and the others, although they never actually referred to it. Like the time after Justine had cut his throat, when Angel refused to forgive him, it went unmentioned, although not forgotten.

In keeping with the way he dealt with such stuff, Wesley didn’t respond to the implied criticism of his ex-lover. He was well aware of Lilah’s faults in the eyes of his friend – both real and perceived. Instead, he addressed the problem of Angel’s secretary.

“The contract specifies that role?”

“Yes.” Angel hauled out a folder filled with ratty-looking pages and began flipping through them. Wesley watched with interest.

For all that vampires were said to be anal and perfectionistic, it seemed that Angel had subscribed to the Cordelia Chase method of filing, which was to say, ‘Put it in the filing drawer and maybe we’ll be able to locate it at a later date.’ Of course, that was probably due to Cordelia’s influence on Angel in the earliest years of Angel Investigations.

Wesley pushed back the momentary flash of guilt and anger that he felt at Cordelia’s situation, and made a diffident suggestion. “You know, maybe you should get Gunn...”

Angel stopped flipping through the folder. “Wesley, do you _really_ think Lilah would leave a loophole to be exploited?”

“I’m just suggesting you should investigate all possibilities,” Wesley said, trying not to sound defensive.

“I have. I’m stuck with her until the contract is up.” Angel slammed the folder shut with a snap. “Where _is_ that list?”

In a similar temper, Wesley suggested, “Look under ‘N’ for ‘numbers.’”

As soon as he’d said it, the humour of it caught.

Irritation gave way to amusement. “Or ‘P’ for ‘phone numbers?’”

“‘B’ for ‘big city’?”

“‘C for ‘contacts.’” Angel stretched out in his chair and their eyes met for a brief, powerful moment.

Then, as swiftly as the mood had come, it was gone. If their shared history sometimes meant times when they turned to each other in memory of another, similar moment, it also meant times when they remembered something uncomfortable and rejected the cue.

Cordelia’s absence was one more fragment of another time and place, a different warp and weft in the fabric of time, before the cloth between them had been rent in twain and repaired. And the loose threads still caught in tangles of memory, too painful to leave hanging, but part of the whole weaving.

Wesley was the first to speak into the awkward silence. “I’ll check the coroner’s office for corpses.”

“I’ll find the numbers for our contacts in New York,” Angel responded, immediately.

He took one last glance at the photos, his mouth twisting in bitter regret and remorse as he looked at the girls who, under better circumstances, would have had someone looking out for them, making sure they didn’t get into situations over their heads.

Wesley knew what it meant to fail the girl you’d been sent to guide. She’d spat it in his face as she took her revenge years ago. And he’d sworn he wouldn’t fail any Slayer again in his duty towards her - however unofficial.

She was still out there, somewhere. Possibly with someone watching her back. Possibly not.

He made a mental note to ask Giles for information about the son of Nikki Wood. Wesley wanted to know everything about this man who’d accompanied Faith across the length and breadth of the country.

“Faith’s still alive,” Angel said, breaking into Wesley’s thoughts.

In spite of Willow’s reassurances, a part of Wesley doubted. “You know that?”

Angel looked down at the photos of the dead Slayers. “No. But Faith’s a survivor.” He’d said it before, and even then Wesley had heard both the ring of truth and the attempt at reassurance.

_She’s a survivor._

He knew she was.

\----

Gunn had seen bad stuff before.

He’d seen the kind of shit that left a man with screaming nightmares. People he knew dead or vamped, limbs gone, bodies scarred, eyes hollow and haunted.

Somehow, even knowing that this girl was a Slayer - born to the fight, called to the fight - didn’t make it better. It made it worse.

Gunn and his people had made the decision to join the fight against the demons. Of course, the alternative to fighting was, ‘Wait for the vamps to come get you.’ Not Gunn’s choice.

He’d been on the streets for years, fighting, toughing it out, learning what he needed to learn, growing where he needed to grow. He’d seen friends die. Some of them, like Alanna, he’d had to kill the second time himself.

He couldn’t help thinking this girl hadn’t chosen the fight. The fight had chosen her.

The fight had killed her.

Gunn tried to listen to the conversation between Wes and the morgue attendant. But his attention kept being drawn to the girl lying on the tray between them.

She was of African-American descent, built slim and lean, and with an innocence about her that was at odds with the brutality visited on her flesh. If Gunn squinted at the face a little, she looked like Alanna.

He wondered if another man somewhere would look down at his sister’s dead face and feel like some bastard had ripped his heart out. Gunn hoped not. For one bitter second, he hoped the girl had been alone in the world. He wouldn’t wish that kind of regret on any man.

“We’ve only got one girl with these kinds of wounds. Your friend’s not any of these other Jane Does?”

“No. Although this one matches the descriptions of other girls gone missing in other cities around the world.”

“Around the world?” The morgue attendant looked up from her clipboard. Wesley didn’t offer an explanation and the woman looked back down again. “Well, if she’s not here, then we haven’t found her yet.”

“I’d prefer it if you didn’t find her at all,” Wesley said dryly, and the woman paused as she realised what she’d implied.

“Sorry.” The apology was sincere, if glib. “You say this girl was a colleague of hers?”

Wesley glanced at Gunn. “We have reason to think so.”

Her mouth twisted, “We get some sick fucks in this city. Probably one of those religious freaks, trying to make a point.” She began covering the dead girl over, preparing her to go back into the cool cubicle from which she’d been pulled. “The LAPD’s detective section is running an inquiry into these deaths. You can report your missing friend, but the city’s huge, and if she’s just missing...”

“Thank you. We’d like to take a copy of the autopsy report away with us,” Wes said.

The woman shook her head as she pushed the corpse of the unknown girl back into it’s little cubicle, “No can do, Mister. Autopsies only get released to the police, the DA, or appropriate federal organisations. You’re not any of those.”

Wes glanced at Gunn who shook his head, just before the woman turned to look at him, suspiciously. He gave her his look most calculated not to raise her hackles.

“Very well then,” the Englishman said, briskly. “We will take up no more of your time. Thank you for your assistance.”

“Yeah, whatever.”

They passed through the sterile grey-green halls of the city morgue, two tall men in dark business suits, following the kinks and corners of the corridor with matching steps.

For a moment, Gunn felt like he should have sunglasses and one of those memory-flash things. He hummed, ‘ _Here come the Men in Black_ ,’ and Wes gave him a sharp look.

“Funny.”

“Hey, I’ll never be Will Smith, but I have my moments.”

“Maybe a few less of them would make us more...hmm...appreciative?”

Gunn glared, but without any venom. “Why’d you want the autopsy anyway?”

The clean-cut face darkened like a thundercloud. “It would make a useful record of what had been done to those girls.”

“For what?”

Wes looked at him like he’d just grown red horns and green skin. “For determining exactly what rite the thing that tortured those girls was trying to complete. And whether it succeeded.”

“So you don’t think this was just for fun?”

“It has a very definite ritualistic feel to it.” Wes said. “And since they’re finding girls like this in Europe as well, that points to a very complex spell. Possibly the opening of some kind of gateway or portal... Raising hell itself, perhaps.”

“But you don’t know.”

“That’s why I need a record of what was done to the girls.” The coldness in Wes’ voice was unmarked, almost as if the plight of those girls hadn’t touched him. Hell, maybe they hadn’t.

Gunn had once thought he had Wesley Wyndham-Pryce pegged. Whether he was thinking, translating, fighting, or pontificating, Wes was a pretty straightforwards guy. He believed in right and wrong, good and evil, he’d never trod the thorny path of questionable morality. And he had a crush on Fred, who was Gunn’s gal, but that was okay. Fred had Gunn wrapped around her little Texan finger; it wasn’t much surprise that English should be in the same boat. They were buddies, after all.

One prophecy and a kidnapping changed everything. The guy who came back to Angel Investigations was darker, more focused, deadly.

Before Wes got his throat slit by Justine, Gunn figured he could take Wes easy. Wes fought by the book, for all his knowledge. Gunn fought dirty, with the experience of the street.

Now, Gunn doubted he’d win. Now, Wes would fight dirty, too - and he’d have more tricks up his sleeve than just that sword of his.

Add to that the whole business with Angelus and Fred and the revelations about Wes’s feelings for Fred and his ‘fuck-buddy’ relationship with Lilah Morgan...

These days, Gunn found himself thinking of Wes as more complex than all the lawyer shit Gunn was learning about.

Gunn shook his head to himself as he pushed open the doors that led out of the morgue and into the city street.

They emerged into bright daylight, blinking as their eyes adjusted to the lighting change. As a result, they were a few steps out of the morgue before Gunn spotted the _real_ men in black clustered around Wesley’s SUV. They didn’t look happy. “Shit.”

They were big. They were bulky. They didn’t look like the kind of guys you’d sit down with for a beer and a tale-swap. These guys probably put the ‘men’ in ‘menacing.’

“Uh-oh. This is not good.”

“You don’t say,” Wes said, as one of the men spotted them and yelled something to his friends.

Guns were pulled from holsters inside jackets. Gunn yanked open the door to the morgue and dived back inside, Wes a split-second behind him.

Just in time.

The first bullets smacked into the wall beside the door, spitting tiny brick chips like shrapnel. The next lot thudded into the thick wood of the door and embedded themselves into the plaster of the inside walls.

Wes yanked the door closed behind him, and slammed the locks closed. He flinched at the sharp thuds of the bullets hitting the other side of the door, mere inches from his head.

“It won’t hold them long.”

Gunn noticed that they didn’t entertain the idea that those men were anything _but_ after them. Way scary when he was getting used to this kind of stuff. “Then we better find another exit to this place.”

They jogged back into the morgue, Gunn leading the way. Behind them, they could hear the door taking a battering under the shoulders and arms of the men.

“So, Gunn,” Wes said as they ran to the front desk. His hands were pulling at the tie around his throat, tugging it free as he stuffed it in his pocket and yanked at the neck of his shirt. “Who’ve you offended now?”

Gunn didn’t respond to the jibe. He didn’t have time. The morgue attendant had just come in, intrigued by the sound of gunshots out in the street. She gaped at them as Gunn demanded, “Are there any other ways out of this building?”

“Wh...? Didn’t you just leave?”

“Ways out?”

“I... There’s no other way out for the public...”

“The bodies are delivered somehow,” Wes said. “Where’s your delivery door?”

Gunn nearly winced at the mention of the corpses as ‘deliveries’ but didn’t say anything. Yet.

She had the gall to look outraged. “Sir, you can’t go out that way...”

“We seem to have acquired people who are after us with a grudge and guns. Either we leave that way, or we won’t be leaving at all,” Wes snapped. “Delivery exit?”

On cue, they heard the crash of the door being battered in. Gunn leaned in towards the shocked woman. “Lady, do you wanna study the dead, or do you wanna _be_ dead? Because I get the feeling these guys aren’t gonna ask first, shoot later.”

The woman just stood there, opening and shutting her mouth like a fish. They were running out of time.

Wesley jerked his head at the doors leading back into the morgue and Gunn followed him, grabbing the arm of the attendance as he passed. She was an idiot, but that didn’t mean she deserved to die.

The girls hadn’t deserved to die either.

He shook the thought away as the woman yanked her arm out of his grip and ran off. Gunn let her go. The silly bint was probably calling the police. For all the good it would do.

Their footsteps slapped against the cement floor, echoing through the complex. There was no way they were moving with stealth. They didn’t need to. They just needed a way out.

And Wes was leading the way without any idea of where they were going.

Not a comforting thought.

“Got anything?” He yelled at Wes as they passed door after door.

“Not this one, not this one...”

Gunn could hear their pursuers approaching. “Can we work out which one it _is_ and get the hell out of here?”

“Not this one...” The Englishman paused, and pushed through a set of double doors and out into a loading bay. “This one!”

A few seconds later, they realised they weren’t any better off. The garage door was shut and would take too long to open. The access door beside it was locked from the inside, needing a key.

“Dead end,” Gunn said in disgust. “Good navigating, Wes.”

Wesley had spun away from the door the minute he’d realised the access door was locked. He was now back across the room, kneeling on the floor of the docking bay over to the side. He pointed down to a circular metal plate as Gunn came towards him. “We can access the sewers via the manhole.”

“The sewers?” Gunn was not pleased. “Wes, do you know how much this suit cost?”

Wes yanked the manhole cover up with a noisy clatter. He reached over and grabbed some things from a nearby crate, and looked over at his friend. “How much is your life worth?” The eyebrows arched in that maddening way that he had, then he slipped into the sewer opening below.

When he put it that way...

Gunn jumped.

He landed with a splash in ankle deep water and winced. There went the shoes. He lifted one foot and grimaced before hearing the sound of the door into the garage slamming open in the room above.

The men in black were continuing the chase.

The sewer was dark and the stench was completely foul. Gunn squinted in the direction in which he could hear Wes’ footsteps. After a moment, the outline of a slim man appeared, darker against the darkness. They were heading further into the sewer network.

Gunn jogged after Wes, trying to stay as much out of the water as possible.

“So back to the firm?” He asked keeping his voice low.

“Yes.”

Gunn glanced around the echoing spaces and tried not to breathe too much through his nose. “I’m hoping you know the way, because I’m a little lost here.” He kept his voice low to stop the echoes travelling.

Wes glanced over his shoulder at Gunn and held out something. Gunn took it, felt the cool, smooth lines of a small crowbar in his hand. “Keep your guard up. The morgue’s at the corner of West 57th and Rover. There used to be a cavern that was home to a nest of vampires nearby...”

Good news was always a bonus. “And the positive?”

Somewhere behind them, there was the sound of loud splashes, reverberating through the tunnels. They heard voices complaining and calling orders back and forth. The words were lost in the echoes, but the tone was clear.

They were still being hunted.

The two men stepped out of the main pipe and into one of the side ones, moving as quietly as they could and as swiftly as they dared. After a few turns, Wes spoke, keeping his voice low. “The vamp nest was cleared out a couple of years ago, if I recall correctly. However, the space they occupied was subsequently taken up by a family of Kelenishkov demons.”

“Good guys or bad?”

“Usually bad, although if they decide they like you early on, they may adopt you.”

“Just what I always wanted,” Gunn muttered.

Wes glanced over his shoulder with a faint smile, “We could see about getting you a clan for your birthday. Only if you’re good of course.”

Gunn peered ahead into the gloomy darkness and listened for footsteps behind and before them. “I think I’ll settle for an X-Box.”

A warbling roar echoed through the tunnels ahead, ringing in their ears. They both froze. Then Wes quipped, “You may get your Kelenishkov demon, whether you want one or not.”

“You know, Wes, you’re just too good to me.”

“I try.”

Something was moving in the tunnel ahead of them, noisy and sure of itself. “So, how do we beat these Kelenishkov demons?”

“We don’t. They’re nearly indestructible, which is why these ones have been here for so long. They need to be banished to their own dimension.”

Gunn was _this close_ to hitting Wes with the crowbar out of sheer annoyance with the Englishman. “Okay, so how do we _disable_ these Kelenishkov demons enough to make our getaway?”

“Go for behind their knees,” Wes told him, probably giving him an irritated glance because of the steady stream of conversation. “They’re fairly sensitive there.”

“Behind the knees?” Gunn asked in disbelief.

“How often do you get hit there?” Gunn could hear the smile, even if it was too dark to see his friend’s face.

They could hear the thing getting closer. It snuffled, rather like a...like a really big, really ugly, knobbled creature with a severe breathing problem.

“Had an idea, Wes. This is going to make noise, right?”

“Probably.”

“Noise will bring the men in black on our tails.”

“Probably.”

“Why don’t we mix the men in black with guns who want to kill us up with the...the demons we’re on our way to fight? Two enemies, one stone; Gunn and Wes make a smooth getaway.”

Wes was about to protest, then the plan seeped into his brain properly. “That’s a good idea,” the smile that grew on his face was sly. “This tunnel is the way out of here. If you can, follow me out. If we get separated, keep taking the right-hand openings until you reach one of the ladders leading up to the street. We’ll meet back at the firm.”

“Last one back buys the drinks.”

“Of course.”

Then the Kelenishkov waded into view. Kelenishkov _s_ , plural.

Gunn had guessed right. The demons were really big, really ugly, knobbled creatures. Really big creatures with...with three legs, each facing outwards. Above the legs rose a humanoid torso with three vicious-looking arms. And the head was definitely nothing to write home about.

“You’re sure it’s behind the knees?”

“Quite.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“When am I not?”

“Does it look like I have time to answer that question?”

Wes laughed and then the demons were on them.

Within a second or two, the tunnel was filled with nothing but the weird roar of the demons and the noisy sound of swinging limbs hitting the metal sides of the tunnel. Within the first couple of seconds, Gunn realised the crowbar wasn’t much good against the knobbled ‘skin’ of the demons. However, it stopped some of the easier swings, which gave Gunn enough time to whack them behind the knee.

He whirled and struck out at a limb causing the demon to howl in fury. He dodged a blow he saw out of the corner of his eye, and crouched down to hook the crowbar in behind the knee. The creature howled in pain as the sharp end of the weapon jabbed deep into the soft flesh there.

Before it could swing at him again, Gunn ducked under the heavy swing of another demon, catching sight of Wes smacking away with his crowbar. Gunn’s own fighting style was utilitarian - he did exactly what he had to and no more. Wes’ style was a lot more graceful, even in the desperation of a cramped, overrun fight like this one. Considering the technique, Wes should have gotten his ass kicked. Somehow he didn’t.

Gunn shook his head and battered another Kelenishkov, which just battered him right back.

There were about a dozen of the demons, which was bad. The upside was that they didn’t seem like particularly vicious fighters. Sure, they were probably indestructible, but they were mostly just big and clumsy, which worked in the guys’ favour as long as they could keep hitting them in what was probably the demon equivalent of the balls.

Another demon came for him, and Gunn leaped past it and hooked the crowbar under the knee joint as he went. At that point, he was facing the way they’d come. So he saw the men who’d been coming after them as they appeared in the mouth of the tunnel.

“Wes!” Another demon, another jab, another howl of fury. A burst of loud, sharp, hard noises that snapped through the air, assaulting his senses.

Gunn figured he was about three quarters of the way through the melee. He’d left more than a few of the demons behind as he and Wes stabbed their way through the pack - or whatever these things called themselves when there were several of them.

He was almost feeling optimistic about their chances of getting through, in spite of all the howling that seemed to be going on. The demons had upped the intensity until Gunn’s brain felt like it was vibrating in his skull.

Then he felt a fiery pain in his left leg.

The meaning of the short, sharp noises penetrated his brain as the bullet penetrated flesh and muscle. It tore through him with a cry that was echoed from his own mouth. He swung the crowbar at the nearest demon, but his leg was screaming for relief from the pressure and pain, and his balance was gone.

He was going down.

“Gunn!”

A moment later, Wes was under his arm, pulling him up, striking out at another demon and hauling Gunn along with him.

Some of the demons they’d disabled before were beginning to assess the threat of the men in black. More than one had begun to lumbering towards them. In fact, as Gunn turned to glance over his shoulder while Wes hit out at another one trying to attach them, most of the Kelenishkov seemed to have decided that the guys were more trouble than they were worth.

At least it meant the gunfire had stopped.

“Gotta get out of here,” Gunn muttered as he swung at a demon who was blocking their passage down the sewer tunnel. “Nearest exit?”

Wes thrust the crowbar towards the knee of another demon. The last one, Gunn saw with relief. Beyond him, the tunnel was clear. “We keep going the way we are.” The demon moved out of the way, and swiped at them as Wes blocked it. It sidled off a bit, glanced down the tunnel where his fellows had gone, looked back at them and glared.

Then it shambled off in the direction of the other fight, scuttling around, keeping a wary eye on them until it judged them out of range. And it was gone.

They had clear passage. Maybe not safe, but clear. For the moment.

Wes was already pulling them towards the next tunnel. Gunn hop-stumbled alongside him, thankful for the shoulder under his arm.

They limped to the next turn, then the next, then the next.

Nothing pursued them, but Gunn kept a firm grip on his crowbar anyway.

When they were far enough away that there was only the sound of their footsteps and the drip and drizzle of water, they stopped and Gunn propped himself up on one leg against the tunnel wall while Wes crouched down to check the wound. “We need to bind this up. I think the bullet’s still in there.”

“Great. Souvenir.” He wasn’t up to words right now, but it was almost comforting to hear Wes talking.

“Good thing the artery’s not hit,” Wes put the crowbar down on the ground and fished around in his pocket before pulling out his tie and wrapping it around the wound while Gunn gritted his teeth against the splintering fire that crawled over his thigh. “You owe me for this tie,” Wes added, glancing up.

Gunn just nodded, too busy fending off the pain to reply. He’d happily owe Wes a whole bar full of drinks for this. Although, knowing English, it would only take a half-dozen to lay him out. He hissed as Wes tied the impromptu bandage tight and stood up. “How’s that?”

Pain still cascaded through his leg, but the pressure over the wound was helping. Just a bit. “I’ll live.”

Wes nodded, and crouched back down to pick up his crowbar before he came to stand alongside Gunn. “Let’s go.”

As Gunn hung his arm over his friend, it struck him that they made an incongruous pair for these dewers, all dressed up in business suits, jackets still on, shirts damp with sweat and the sewer water. After that last fight, he was feeling kinda feverish.

So when Wes spoke, it took him a moment to process the words. “That was a good idea of yours.”

Gunn was having trouble concentrating. “Getting shot?”

“Setting the demons on our would-be assailants.” Wes glanced at him, “You okay?”

His breath hissed between his teeth. “A little dizzy. Feeling kinda feverish. But we’ll keep going.” It wasn’t like they had a choice.

“Okay.”

They kept going.

\----

She’d been expecting vampires.

She got demons.

It was the difference between being able to stand back from the door and fire arrows at them, and going against a dozen of them, hand to hand.

They came in, eerily silent. No grunts, screams, taunts, or any of the noises she was used to hearing from her opponents. Just the great, lumbering silence of the reptilian bodies.

And Faith was tired. She’d been tired for a while, fighting every night, sleeping a few hours in the dawn, working all day at the diner. She’d been tired after the battle against Angelus, after the battle against the First, after going to Cleveland and seeing the Hellmouth there.

Her life since being Chosen was a blur of deaths, demon and human. She was tired of death, tired of slaying, tired of having her own little portion of the world on her shoulders, tired of everything that had made her who she was from the moment she’d been Chosen – the moment she’d left childhood behind.

If this was the kind of life her predecessors had lived, no wonder Slayers didn’t have a long life expectancy. B had survived eight years of Slayerdom, dying twice in the process.

As she ducked fluidly under the scaly arm of one of her attackers, Faith grabbed him and used him as a club against three others.

Now, she wished she’d stayed with Robin in New York. Or even brought him along. He’d been great at watching her back.

Now, she wished she’d called him this afternoon as she’d thought of doing when she left work.

Her momentum from the swing carried her hand down to the tazer one had dropped. She picked it up and skipped a demon before jabbing it into the abdomen of the next. As she did, she brought her leg up, kicking another one down.

But for each one she kicked down, there were others.

There were too many of them, coming too swiftly at her.

And she was just one Slayer.

For a moment, she envied Nikki Wood. Unlike any other Slayer, Nikki had left something of herself in the world – a legacy in her son, Robin.

Faith would leave nothing.

In the big city of New York, there’d been plenty of vamps to slay and demons to hunt, Robin’s Mom’s Watcher was cool, if a little desiccated, and the food was awesome. Robin was great company, if not quite the anchorage Faith found she yearned for. On the whole, Faith had been happy in New York. Sort of.

Then the discontent had slammed into her with the force of the Beast’s fist. She didn’t _belong_ in New York. She liked the city and the people she met, but she had a hole inside that the food and the slaying didn’t quite fill. Even Robin didn’t quite fill it.

So Faith told him she was headed to LA for a while, by herself, to go see Angel and the gang.

She’d reached LA, but Angel wasn’t there and she couldn’t seem to find anyone willing to talk about him on the street. They were all about the big new boss at Wolfram and Hart – a scary bastard that you really didn’t want to cross.

The last time Faith crossed Wolfram and Hart, she’d nearly ended up dead.

So she’d stayed and slayed. And slayed. And slayed.

Faith was tired of slaying.

They pinned her arms in a flesh-bruising grip, and sat on her legs so she couldn’t kick. They bound her, hand and foot, without a word or a grunt or a clickety-click of some weird demon tongue. They stuffed a gag in her mouth and poked her in the throat in case she tried to scream.

Faith didn’t bother. Screaming was only of use when you had someone to hear it, and the Hyperion wasn’t exactly Grand Central Station, New York city.

So there was only the sound of her panting and the grunts she made as she picked opportune times to kick free of her captors.

Of course, the opportune times weren’t quite opportune enough to get away.

She was trussed up like a turkey for thanksgiving dinner. But even in the midst of their handling, these demons were careful and cautious of her. They treated her as though she was both dangerous and precious; live cargo, not dead meat.

Which was a compliment about her skills as a Slayer; just not the kind of compliment she wanted right now in this way. She’d rather have been undervalued and given the chance to escape.

Dead was easy. Faith had thought about it since she learned from her first Watcher that a Slayer fought the vamps and demons. And fought the vamps and demons. And fought the vamps and demons. Until she died.

A long life was not on the books for any Slayer.

It was definitely not on the books for Faith, not now.

What she was worried about was the bit that came _before_ death. The part that usually hurt.

The shoulder in her belly hurt as one of the creatures slung her over its shoulder like the proverbial sack of potatoes. Faith nearly retched.

Then her vision was reduced down to the inside of a heshen bag and something slammed into her skull, and after that, there was only darkness.

\----

They were playing cards when they heard the door from the garage close behind Wesley.

As if on cue, Angel’s cellphone buzzed.

Angel clambered to his feet with the swift grace of a predator, and grabbed the phone from off the chair where it sat. He looked oddly casual in the knitted sweater he wore – a long-ago gift from Cordelia to help him ‘relax’ and never worn. Not until Cordy was no longer there to see him wear it.

It softened his darkness, made him less intimidating.

Fred figured that was why he never wore it to the office.

“Hello...? Oh, hi, Kennedy.”

Fred looked at Angel, but he’d turned away to the window to talk. And then Wesley came into the room and her attention was captured by the weariness in him.

He walked like a man who’d seen horrors he only wished to forget, and hardly noticed them as he came in. But when Charles spoke up from his place on the couch, “Wes?” Wesley looked up and his mouth twisted into something that wasn’t quite a smile and yet held elements of relief and repulsion.

“Not her.”

The tension in the air eased, just a little. It had been there since Wesley had gotten the call from the morgue to go in and identify another Jane Doe. Long dark hair, olive skin, early twenties, tattoo; they’d feared it was Faith, but it wasn’t.

It wasn’t.

For such small things, Winifred Burkle could be very grateful. Faith meant a lot to Angel and Wesley. And because they cared about what happened to Faith, so did Fred.

“You should have some dinner,” she suggested. Wesley often forgot to eat while he was doing his research – like Fred. And the last few days had been very stressful for him and Angel in particular. “Lorne made crabcakes.”

“Just a little something I whipped together. They’re still in the dish if you want ‘em.”

“Tasty stuff,” Charles added.

Wesley paused, “I might have a little something. Lunch seems like a long time ago now.” He moved across the large living room to the kitchen, putting his briefcase on one of the chairs and draping his jacket over it.

Charles exhaled slowly. “That’s something at least,” he said, keeping his voice low enough so only Lorne and Fred could hear.

Fred stared at her cards, “He’s had a lot on his mind.”

“And then some,” Lorne added as he shuffled his hand. “One less thing off his mind for the moment.”

“So, whose turn is it?” Charles asked.

Fred barely noticed his question; she was looking at Lorne, who was looking at Angel. Fred looked at Angel, who was standing completely still, as if he weren’t a vampire so much as a statue.

“Thanks Kennedy. Yes, we’ll let you know. Thank you.”

By now, they were all looking at him, waiting for the axe.

And he turned, a silhouette against the evening sky beyond. “They found a new Slayer. Just called.” The words were barely audible.

A new Slayer. Just called. Which meant another Slayer had died, although, in fact, a lot of Slayers had died in the last few days and no new Slayers had been called for them. And Angel had shared the theory that as long as no new Slayers were called then it mean that the one Slayer the gang knew personally was still alive, and that was...

“Faith?” The name was soft, pained. Fred turned to look at Wesley but he wasn’t looking at her. Instead, his eyes sought Angel’s as Angel looked to him.

“They got in contact with the guy she left with for New York. She was in the city until a couple of weeks ago, then she decided she’d come down to LA and visit us.”

“And since then...?”

“He heard from her once a week, got a call when she made it to LA, but he hasn’t heard from her since then.”

“How long?”

“Nearly a week.”

It was as though there was nobody in the room but the two of them, and the girl of whom they spoke.

In a way, there wasn’t.

Faith belonged to a time and a history that none of the others in the room shared. If Cordelia had been here, perhaps it would have been different.

Cordelia wasn’t here.

Fred didn’t dare break the silence. It wasn’t hers to end.

Then, Angel moved. Faster than any of them expected, he crossed the room, hand clenched around the cellphone, grabbing for his coat draped over the chair. It trailed behind him, dragging minor turbulence in the wake of his passage. A moment later, they heard his footsteps descending the stairs to his rooms beneath the house.

Wesley laid his plate down on the table and laid his hands either side, staring off into space. Then he picked the plate up in one hand, took his briefcase and coat in the other, and left with a muttered apology. His footsteps were muffled against the carpet as he went up to his rooms on the first floor, but they heard his door close, firmly and finally.

“So, that’s it?” Fred heard herself ask, looking from one face to another, seeking answers, seeking certainty. “Faith’s just...dead?”

Charles folded his cards together and laid them down on his lap, his movements slow and regretful. “You generally don’t get live after you’ve done dead,” he said quietly. “And a new Slayer was called.”

“But we don’t know...”

“No,” Charles said shortly. “We don’t. But they think so. And they sure as hell know a shitload more about Slayers than you or I ever forgot.” One hand reached down to lightly rub at the bandage covering the gunshot wound he’d received several days ago. Wesley had located a spell to speed the healing process, and it seemed to be working well. Charles should be back on his feet and around the place in a matter of days instead of several weeks. “I guess that’s it, then.”

“So it would seem,” Lorne said quietly. The anagogic demon winced. “They’re taking it very hard.”

“You think?” Sarcasm was one more weapon Charles used with expert skill. This time, at least, he used it gently. “I sure don’t need to be psychic to pick that up. The girl meant a lot to them.”

Charles threw down his cards on the coffee table, silently indicating the game was over. He shifted on the lounge again, wincing a little as the movement pulled the tender muscles of his healing leg. Fred kept an eye on him. They weren’t dating anymore. That didn’t mean she didn’t care. “We need to find the fucker who’s doing this and put him in his own personal hell.”

“Giles and Willow don’t have any leads,” Fred said. “And they’ve been doing this for a long time.”

“They don’t have the resources of Wolfram and Hart at their fingertips,” Charles reminded her. “We do.”

“For all the good those resources do us,” she muttered. The two men looked at her. “Haven’t you tried to get any of the other branches to send you something, yet?” She’d tried it several times, mostly test results or specific items that they’d run out of in the LA branch. She hadn’t received anything from another Wolfram and Hart branch office to date.

“Not yet.”

“Don’t bother. They certainly don’t.” Fred knew she was getting strange looks from the other two. They hadn’t expected her to be so indignant about the other branches, and she was feeling a little silly. But she wanted some of those results and she knew the other branches were holding them back.

“Well, even restricted to LA, we’ve still got more than the Sunnydale gang ever had to work with. And they stopped the end of the world several times over.” Charles sounded almost irritatingly sure of himself. Fred had loved that certainty while they were going out. Charles would know what to do. And if Charles didn’t, Wesley would.

The certainty was now irking.

The card game was quite evidently over. Even if Angel hadn’t left without a further word, nobody remaining was in a mood to play.

And Fred was worried about Wesley.

“Believe me, there’s nothing on Earth that will stop those two from going after the culprit,” Lorne was saying to Charles. “And I wouldn’t like to be him when they catch him.” The couch creaked as he leaned back.

“Actually, I’d like to be there when they do.” Charles cracked his knuckles, threateningly. For a moment, Fred could see the Charles Gunn she’d met when she first came back from Pylea; the street-wise young man, suspicious and a little wary. He’d lived by his wits and his fists, and done a good job of it. But there’d been so much more to him – as his current involvement in the law firm showed.

Fred packed up the cards, grabbed her jacket from the chair over which she’d draped it, and left them to discussing what would happen to the perpetrator of all these crimes.

If asked, she would have told them she was going upstairs to do some Internet research for one of her projects.

In actual fact, she went to Wesley.

“I’m sorry for interrupting,” she began, expecting him to tell her to go away and come back later.

“Not at all,” he said with typical Wesley-like courtesy. He opened the door wider, ushering her in. “Come in.”

She’d been to Wesley’s apartment, back in the days when he still kept it. Although there’d been room at the Hyperion for all of them, both Wesley and Cordelia had kept their apartments. Fred guessed it had something to do with personal space, and holding onto the last shreds of independence from Angel and his work.

The air of Wesley’s apartment had been one of abandonment. He stayed there, came back for things, but he didn’t _live_ there, and it had showed. Even when Fred had come to see him, looking for support to kill Professor Seidel, the apartment had been messy with the paraphernalia of life, but still not really _lived in_.

This suite at least felt like it was lived in, even if it was mostly books.

They were stacked up in wall-to-wall bookshelves, which were interspersed with tables on which small artefacts were displayed. The books were probably originally sorted by topic and age, since Wesley was big on organisation. Although, he was also big on research, and research tended to mean organisation went out the window - as Fred well knew from running the R&D department at Wolfram and Hart.

She took a seat in one of the high-backed, old-fashioned lounges, noting the books he had piled up on the low table in the centre of the room. Some were open, showing diagrams and personal notes. Most were closed. Over by the corner lamp, the white rim of a plate gleamed in the light, the uneaten crabcakes strewn across its surface.

“I apologise for leaving so abruptly, earlier,” Wesley said as he resumed his seat and closed up the books he’d been reading.

“You needed space,” Fred responded.

“Which then makes me ask why you’re here.” The way he spoke wasn’t quite pouncing on her words, but there was a certain...knowingness in his voice that shivered over her body. Soft and throaty, with that crisply precise accent that she’d occasionally imagined making exquisite love to her – even while she was with Charles.

Angelus had been right. Wesley was rugged and handsome, intelligent and well-read. As long as Fred knew him, he’d been that way.

But the darkness was new. Since The Estrangement, and the business with Angel, Justine, the guilt of what he’d done, and the distance that fell between them when she and Charles began to see each other. Fred wasn’t even going to start on the topic of Lilah Morgan and the weirdness of Wesley’s relationship with the lawyer.

“I just thought...” she began. “I wanted to make sure you were okay. What with the news of Faith, and all.” She stared down at her hands in her lap, and realised she was sitting up straight, as prim as a schoolkid in the presence of a teacher.

And, perhaps because he saw her nervousness, he suddenly relaxed, no longer seeming predatory as he leaned back against the chair. “I’m...okay.”

“You don’t look okay,” Fred told him. And he looked like shit. Elegant shit, as Charles would say, but shit nevertheless.

He smiled a little. “It’s difficult to think of her dead,” he murmured, without elaborating on exactly who. “Whether we were working towards the same goal or not, she always had such an intensity about her.” One hand gestured at the table and the open tomes sprawled haphazardly across the fine woodgrain surface. “I was reading my notes about her back from my days as a Watcher.” His voice trailed off, and his eyes stared into space, seeing something from that time, remembering something that made the sensitive mouth twist.

“What?”

He looked up. “Old regrets.” When she waited for him to continue, he shifted. “I was wondering, if I had been who I am now when I was first called to serve as a Watcher, would Faith still have done what she did.”

“You...you felt strongly about her.” It was something of a surprise to Fred. After Willow and Faith had left for Sunnydale, he’d spoken of Lilah, but not of Faith.

The dark-fringed eyes looked at her, unhidden by glasses. Without the concealing glass and the wire frames, his gaze was powerful, disconcerting. “I would be lying if I didn’t say that Faith is a large part of what I am today. Her influence on my life has brought me to this point, just as my influence on her life in Sunnydale assisted her descent into darkness.”

Fred was caught up in his gaze, a little amazed that, even in the midst of his grief, he was thinking philosophically about the dead Slayer. “Did you ever consider...being her Watcher again? When you broke her out of prison, I mean?”

“Of course,” he said easily. “Hunting down first the Beast, then Angelus... It was what I’d been trained to do, all my life. Fighting the darkness, with my Slayer taking point while I protected her back...” His demeanour went very still. “Even putting her in danger in order to get the job done.” Soft as rustling leaves in the fall, the words whispered through the room, like layers of guilt, mulching down on the ground of his soul. “She deserved better.”

“Maybe she had the best.” She blushed a little and her heart beat a touch faster as Wesley glanced warmly at her. “Faith was smart,” she said in explanation. “Streetwise. I think she knew a good bet when she saw it.” It was extrapolation, but wasn’t that what physicists did? Suggest a reasonable theory and look for the evidence to back it up? “She was coming back to LA. Maybe she was coming back to see you.”

“Or Angel.”

“Or maybe both.” Fred wasn’t deterred. “You don’t know what she was thinking. But she was on her way here, and there’s only two people in this city I think she really cared about...”

He smiled, a faint, deprecating curve of the lips. “I disagree, but thank you.”

Silence fell between them, rolling over them in gently uncomfortable waves. After a moment where Fred searched for something to say, she stood, knowing she looked nervous, but not knowing how _not_ to look nervous. “Anyway, I came to see that you were okay. And now I should probably go up to my rooms and do some work,” she said, babbling to fill the quiet. “We’ve been doing some complex testing on protein strands with the possibility of developing a blood synthetic that would provide the same effect...”

“...on vampires as real blood,” Wesley finished for her as he rose from the couch. “I know. I read the reports that come out of the labs.”

“You do?” She was genuinely surprised at that.

He smiled, warmly. “Of course.”

The silence swept in, filling the gaps in their conversation. Fred flushed and turned to go, and somehow there was a warm hand on her arm.

“I always read what you’re working on,” he said with poignant simplicity, and the heat rushed to her cheeks. “It’s interesting.”

“Not everyone thinks so.” From this close, she could smell the tang of his scent, sweet and indeliably male.

“I’m not everyone.” He was smiling, and again, Fred had the sensation that she didn’t really know the man who was restraining her with nothing more than his fingers on her arm.

Fred found Wesley attractive. She always had. He was a gentleman and a good man, and handsome, thoughtful, and clever as well. She’d known he liked her. Even before Angelus made his revelations about Wesley’s interest in her, Fred knew. And she’d loved Charles, but Wesley was always there, and compelling in his own intense way...

This close, he was _very_ compelling. Fred could see very clearly the thin rim of pale iris in his eyes, the pupils dilated in the artificial light, the fringe of dark lashes that made his eyes seem somehow bluer. This close, she could feel the heat of him so close to her own cool skin. His breath was warm against her lips as he leaned in to kiss her...

Chords blared, the opening bars of Offenbach’s ‘ _Can-Can’_. She sprang back, startled by the interruption of her cellphone. Wesley also jerked back, and she hooked a strand of hair over her ear, suddenly self-conscious as she searched out the device buzzing smugly in her jacket pocket.

There weren’t too many people who called her at any time, and, at this hour, she could guess who it was.

She was right.

Knox was suitably apologetic about the interruption. “Look, I know you wanted to keep work and home separate and everything, but I was thinking about the arrangement of the protein strings in the compound and how we might be going about this the wrong way... Do you have a few minutes – not more than half an hour – just to go through the findings from the last set of tests...?”

Fred glanced at Wesley, who’d moved away to give her some space for the conversation. The mood was spoiled, and she’d been planning to go through the test plans sometime tonight anyway. And they were _so_ close to making a breakthrough...

...but there was Wesley, watching her with patient eyes.

She paused the call with Knox, “It’s just about tomorrow’s testing... I was going to do this later, but...” She indicated the phone, helplessly.

He was polite, but she could see the resignation in his eyes as he spoke. “It happens. Go sort out your testing.” When she didn’t resume the conversation, he jerked his head at the door, smiling a little. “Go.” And Fred felt the words he didn’t say – the words that warmed her to her toes. _I’ll still be here when things settle down._

Fred went.

\----

They chained her up in a tiny little space and left her there during the day. The thick sandstone shaded from deep grey to pale grey, to gentle hues of pale, grubby gold, to beautiful warm red-and-gold streaked hues from nine until five. Then, as the sun set, the colour leached out of the stones, taking them back to their ugly dull grey.

Then the vampire came.

Faith thought of this one as the leader of the pack, since he was the one who ordered the others around. Snatches of conversation suggested he wasn’t the big boss, though. Someone else was the one giving the ultimate orders – and he wanted Faith alive.

That and the fear the vamps had for this ‘big boss’ behind the scenes were the only two things keeping the vamps from drinking her dry or turning her into one of them.

“Good evening, madam Slayer. Ready for tonight’s meal?” His polite words were always tainted with mockery, but Faith didn’t respond to it. “No pithy response today? No smart comment?” Lead Vamp seemed disappointed. “Angelus’ little blonde thing in Sunnydale is said to be full of witticisms as she slays. Surely you can conjure up even a fraction of the spirit she displays?”

Faith couldn’t.

She had little enough strength as it was. Her wrists and ankles were chafed raw from the manacles, and her shoulders ached from keeping her arms up all the time in the cell. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d slept, and in the thin white singlet and black panties they allowed her, she was always cold.

So she conserved her energy and her anger as Lead Vamp smacked her about a bit before calling in his minions to drag her out into the church proper.

Faith had never liked churches much. Cold, empty places with unsympathetic old men up the front, and a God who didn’t seem to care, let alone hear the prayers of the faithful. He’d never answered any of Faith’s childhood prayers, and she’d long ago given up on a deity in place of self-reliance.

Angel had been the closest thing to a guardian that Faith had ever had. Pun fully intentional.

And Angel was gone.

It hurt. It hurt about as much as waking up to discover that the world had moved on without her, that Mayor Wilkins was dead, that Buffy was living it up as the Slayer.

At least this time, Faith knew who to lash out at - and it wasn’t Buffy.

She’d staked vampires until her arms were sore. She’d fought demons until her body ached. She’d done what a Slayer was supposed to do - and done it without backup, without Slayerettes, without even a prissy Watcher to boss her around.

God, what she wouldn’t have given for Wes - even Wes as she’d first met him, all stiff and uptight as he’d been.

Part of her wanted to go back to New York city and Robin. He hadn’t been Angel, but he’d been good company.

In came the vampire flunkeys; one, two, three. Faith braced herself against the pain in stiff muscles as they hauled her out like so much cargo. She was dragged up to the front the church hall like a side of beef, arms out towards the high, arched windows; feet chained to the floor. The ropes threaded through her manacles pulled her arms apart, tearing at muscles that hadn’t been given a chance to stretch, and she gasped in pain and swayed on her feet.

Only the tension in the ropes kept her upright, and her shoulders screamed in agony as she swung a little too far and couldn’t regain her balance.

She was still off-balance when the lead vampire took a good long drink out of her, his claws digging gently into her already-sore shoulders to prevent her from jerking away.

Faith jerked away anyway, ignoring the way his talons left raised welts across her flesh and shredded the material of her singlet top. What little space she had, she used to slip out from under his fangs, denying him the meal. He’d eat soon enough anyway, she was just the appetiser.

He raised animal-yellow eyes to her, “So,” he murmured, “There is some spirit in there after all...” He trailed one finger down her temple to her jaw. “You should consider yourself lucky, Slayer.”

_Lucky for what? Getting to watch you and the rest of your kind feed off me and off them? For being alive?_

She’d rather be dead than have to watch this every night.

Beyond the torchlight, figures moved in the shadows, slowly gaining definition. The people were herded through the church doors, like sheep to the proverbial slaughter.

Faith knew what they saw. As they came out of the darkness, their eyes would be drawn towards the light. Her flame-illuminated body, battered and bruised, would be the first thing they saw. Her flame-illuminated body, tied and tired, would be more or less the last thing they saw. Ever.

The vampire leader turned to see where her gaze led, and smiled, his fangs still tinged red with Faith’s blood. “Ah,” he murmured and stepped away, “Dinner awaits.”

Faith knew what came next. She’d seen it last night, and the night before that, and the night before that. The people would be given a good, hard look at her before the vamps fed on them. The vampires liked the taste of fear.

And here she was, the great warrior, the Slayer, tied between two poles, unable to do a single, fucking thing.

The irony wasn’t lost on her: she was a Vampire Slayer captured by vamps and unable to help herself, let alone them.

Faith looked the victims-to-be in the eye, trying to remember faces, expressions, _people._ The dignity of memory was all she could give them, and it wasn’t enough. She could feel that.

Her gaze flitted over the victims, and stopped on the familiar features of a tall, lean man. Eyes that she knew were blue in the light shone black in the irregular flare of the torches.

She breathed his name, her mouth shaping the syllables like a prayer or a plea or an abject denial. And all hell broke loose.

\----

As a kid, Gunn was taught that churches were sacred places. They might be fancy buildings of stone and stained glass, like this one, or they might be plain wooden buildings with plastic chairs for the congregation, like the one he and Alanna had gone to until their Gran died, but they were special, holy places.

The ideas of vampires taking an abandoned church and turning it into their nest was so wrong that Gunn couldn’t even begin to describe how wrong it was.

And the girl strung up in the nave like so much dead meat made it a thousand times worse.

The torchlight gleamed off her barely-clad body, and made black the bloody wounds and welts that the vamps had inflicted on her. It glinted off the trail of blood running from her throat, down over her clavicle and into the white cotton of her singlet top. She was an obscene parody of a saviour; arms spread, head hanging, and sagging with a pain and exhaustion so strong, Gunn could taste it in the air.

Around him, the people who’d preceded them into the church were making muffled noises of terror. Gunn didn’t blame them; he felt like being sick himself. Unlike them, however, he could fight back. His fingers tightened around his sword hilt, feeling the leather binding press into his palm.

The urge to slaughter these vamps soared through him, strong as any bloodlust, and he glanced at Angel for the signal to move.

The souled vampire had taken up a position behind them, pretending to be their captor to get them into the church without notice. Now, the hood of his robe was flung back, and he was staring at the half-dead girl with a dawning recognition in his eyes.

Beside Gunn, Wes uttered a single word and stepped backwards out of the line of fearful victims. He moved with a deadly purpose, his arm swinging out to bring his sleeve-sword into play. The first vampire died in a shower of dust as Gunn finally heard what Wes had said.

_Faith._

Those nearest the vampire shrieked, drawing attention to them. Gunn cursed as he headed for the nearest knot of vamps, and yelled at the bystanders to get out of the church. He spared a glance for the girl, this time, actually _seeing_ her.

They’d planned to wait for a quiet moment, then break the Slayer out of the church, coming back at daybreak to finish off the vamps. Wes’ actions had sent all that to hell, and now there were four of them fighting against God knew how many dozen vamps.

One came at him, expecting an easy kill. Gunn dodged the blow, and slipped the stake into its chest like a hot knife plunged into butter. He turned and kicked out at the vamp coming up behind him, pushing him backwards and into a bunch of civilians. His leg twinged, reminding him that he was only newly healed, thanks to that speed-healing spell Wesley had found. He had mobility, but not flexibility. _Damn._

They were seriously outnumbered here, too many vamps and not enough fighters. Heaps of civilians, though, if only a few would fight back and redress the balance.

A few were. Not very effectively, since they had no idea what they were up against, but they were occupying several of the vamps – which meant they weren’t trying to take out Gunn and his friends. Cold as that thought was, Gunn didn’t have the luxury of concern. Not in the middle of the fight.

He ducked under a punch by a vamp, sticking a stake in its back on the way past, then kicking the one behind it so he had time to reach up for the torch in its holder.

The holder itself was used as a pivot-point as he flung his back at the wall and slammed the torch into the chest of a vamp who’d gotten too close. “Fire in the hole!” Two vamps went up in flames and dust.

Beyond the others swiftly advancing on him, Gunn could see Angel’s profile as the souled vampire fought with fist and sword, avoiding the lethal thrusts of his opponents. Closer to Gunn, Wes’ sword flashed in and out of the fray with the fury of a madman or beserker.

When they got out of this mess, Gunn was going to have a small talk with Wes about good timing and when not to leap into the middle of a fight where they’d be outnumbered.

Gunn caught a glimpse of Fred’s light brown hair, close to where Faith hung. He saw the knife flash to sever the ropes holding her arms in place. He saw the Slayer collapse.

And then the vampires came at him again.

\----

Faith was alive.

When Angel brought them the news of the Slayer held captive in the church, Wesley never dreamed it might be Faith. In his mind’s eye, Faith was dead, mutilated like the girls in the pictures, in the morgue. He’d thought of her as battle scarred and mutilated, her palms raw and bleeding; the hole in her side gaping its slit edges with ugly mockery.

He’d thought her dead, and her replacement already called.

So when he’d seen her properly, let his eyes rest upon the drag of dark hair, dark eyes, pale skin, and the lean, familiar lines of her body, Wesley had acted on his Watcher instincts. And in doing so, he’d endangered his friends.

He regretted it now as he lashed out at another vampire. Its companion moved left, out of his sight, and he struggled to track it and keep an eye on the one he fought. They were vastly outnumbered by their enemies – never a good situation.

A quick feint of his sword to the left caused his opponent to follow his movement, only realising its mistake as Wesley pulled back enough to miss the vampire’s arm and reversed his swing to lop off its head. He allowed the impetus of his swing to continue through, turning his back on the creature as it crumbled into dust, and bringing him around to face the one behind him.

It had not expected his movements, and howled as the sword bit into its arm, nearly severing the limb from the torso. Wesley punched it in the chin to get it off the sword, then struck out, aiming for the neck as it stumbled. Another explosion of dust and it was gone.

As he moved to engage a vamp that was attempting to drink of a young woman, he saw that Faith had been cut down from her place in the nave of the church. Fred’s doing, no doubt, and a good one. A Slayer – even one weakened by pain and torture – had a strength most humans couldn’t hope to match.

But even a Slayer had her limits.

Ordinary humans certainly did.

Muscles in his arms were beginning to ache, just a little. He was short of breath. One of the vamps had punched him in the solar plexus when he’d dropped his sword for a few seconds. But there seemed to be no end to the vampires coming at them and no respite from their efforts.

The vampire that engaged him now was clever and canny, faster than Wesley and with a long, slender bar of ancient iron piping to defend against Wesley’s sword. Wesley swung, the vampire parried and riposted, and he felt the shock all the way up his shoulder as he just managed to block the blow.

He saw the punch coming, but couldn’t do anything to block it – and then he didn’t need to. The vampire exploded in a shower of dust, revealing Faith behind it.

Her eyes met Wesley’s and held them, and he couldn’t breathe. Then another vampire leaped up behind her, and she whirled to face it, her hair flying dark and whiplike through the air as she blocked its blows.

Wesley nearly forgot to duck the right uppercut the next vamp threw at him. As it was, it snapped his jaw up. He retaliated with his sword, and the vamp was dust and gone. But he was shaken.

Faith had looked back at him with a shocking weariness. The fire he remembered in her eyes was dimmed, almost extinguished.

He’d never seen her like this before.

Someone yelped in pain, and his heart screamed, _Fred!_

Time slowed. As Wesley dispatched the vampire before him, he saw Angel turn in response to that cry. And the vampire Angel had been fighting saw his chance.

The board hit with a resounding _thwack!_ Angel went down, poleaxed.

Faith screamed something out across the room, the first sign of real passion she’d shown tonight. She scrambled to help him, but the vampire was already lifting the board above his head, angling it so the point would spear down through bone and muscle and into Angel’s unbeating heart...

Burnished silver gleamed in the murky darkness. The vampire’s head toppled off it’s neck, exploding into dust on the way down. A slender, lithe figure whirled away, shoulder-length hair swinging easily about her face.

_Her_ face? Wesley squinted, but the darkness was too heavy for such fine details.

Whoever she, or he, was, they fought with superhuman strength and speed. It was like watching a Slayer in action, and as more of their number fell before the fighter’s onslaught, the vampires became wary of her.

Angel was down and not moving, but Faith and Fred were there now, standing over him, back to back. Gunn had his shoulders up in a corner, but he was ably fending off his opponents. Even as Wesley watched, one ignited as it failed to get with the torch he held. It reeled back into its companion and they went up like moths in flames, fluttering wildly before they dissolved into ash.

And then there was one.

Just the one Faith was fighting – the leader of the pack. Wesley’s gaze traced her moves, clean and sweet, even in the shadows of the church, in the shadows of her soul. And _this_ time, there was passion.

She slammed her fist into his jaw with the hard crack of knuckles on bone, and swept his feet out from beneath him, lightning fast. The vampire never had a chance against the Slayer. Especially not this one.

He felt a moment’s hot pride; an exultation as fierce as the summer sun beating down on his skin. The Watcher’s Council had outcast him years ago, but he could still look upon this Slayer and feel pride in her making. Faith’s road had been a slow and painful journey, but, looking at her at this moment, Wesley could not say he felt guilt or sorrow at her making. The finest blades had always required many forgings before they were used in battle.

But he had to stop her now.

He reached her side in seconds, and brought the point of the sword down into the belly of the creature, waving Faith away. She stared at him a moment, a frown forming across her face, before understanding rose and she relaxed.

Wesley drew the sword down the vampire’s abdomen slowly, watching the blood well up sluggishly - dead blood in a dead body.

“Wes, man...” Gunn’s voice betrayed his uncertainty at his actions. Wesley held up one hand and the other man fell silent. Gunn might not understand Wesley’s motivations just now, but he trusted that there was a reason for what was happening.

This wasn’t going to be pretty, but it had to be done.

“Who hired you?” Wesley asked the vampire.

“I... No-one!” It grunted, “Just kill me and have done with it!”

“Guys, what’s going on?” Fred paused as she came up to them, taking in the scene. “Wesley? What...”

He interrupted her, “Fred, check for survivors.”

“Wesley?” He didn’t need to see her expression, he could feel her gaze on his face, silently arguing with what he was doing. There were a few seconds where he was almost swayed, before he looked at her, without emotion.

“Please, Fred, go check on Angel and look for survivors.” He didn’t want her watching while he did this. He didn’t need the guilt of his actions complicated by her presence.

She looked at Faith, standing pale and composed on the other side of the vampire, and her gaze drifted to Gunn. Then she turned on her heel and went to Angel, walking stiffly. Gunn gave Wesley a searching glance, then nodded and turned away, leaving Wesley and Faith to the interrogation.

He looked into the vampire’s dark eyes. It glared back. “What makes you think I have a boss?”

“You kept me alive,” Faith said, quietly. “If it wasn’t for him, you’d have killed me that first night.” Her voice was like ice shards, sharp as knives, with all the emotion of stone. “Someone wanted me alive - someone you fear.”

“I fear nothing!” The words were spat, expelled from its mouth as it writhed under the point of Wesley’s sword.

“And yet you kept a Slayer alive,” Wesley said coolly. “To have a Slayer in your grasp and not turn her?” He made a sound of disbelief. “Tell us and we’ll make it fast.”

It leered at Wesley, “Worried about your Slayers, Watcher?” Fangs bared in an awful grin, “You should be,” it said. “They’re all going to die.”

Wesley twisted the sword without mercy and the beast howled in pain, a long, drawn-out ululation that trembled the rafters with its echoes.

“Wesley?” Fred again. He closed his eyes against her face, against the appeal behind it. “Don’t do this.”

Her soft eyes wrenched him to the soul, so he looked away. He looked straight into the empty darkness of Faith’s gaze.

Wesley had always thought of Faith as resilient. She took a punching and got back up, stubborn and feisty as ever. That had been her _modus operandi_ for as long as he’d known her. This... This was neither the arrogant chit who’d defied him in Sunnydale, nor the broken girl who’d sobbed in the lane outside the apartment where she’d tortured him. It wasn’t the indolent woman who bandied words about from the other side of the prison glass, or the Slayer focused on capturing Angelus.

How long had she been held by the vampires? Two days? Three? They’d sapped her strength as surely as they’d sapped her blood. They’d strung her up in parody of a messiah, and brutalised her mind by making her helpless.

He had to do this.

For the emptiness in Faith’s eyes if nothing else - the personal side of who he was.

The Slayers were dying, being killed off with methodical insistence. Just as the First had targeted the Potentials; so, too, was this antagonist targeting Slayers. And if they couldn’t find who was behind it and stop them, the deaths would continue. Girl after girl after girl, tortured and killed for something over which she had no choice.

Wesley felt his resolve harden within him.

He’d been brought up by Watchers, trained as one for years. He’d briefly served in that capacity before the Council had cast him out. Watching - _protecting_ \- Slayers was deeply ingrained in his psyche.

He turned his back on her, gently disengaging his arm from her fingers as he turned back to the vampire. “Fred, please see to Angel.” He wished he didn’t have to treat her this way, but this was his responsibility, part of who he was. It went to the core of everything Wesley had been for most of his life, and not even for Fred could he change that.

She went, and Faith’s eyes tracked her across the church, before flickering back to rest on his face. She looked down at the vampire. “So,” she asked, conversationally. “Were you going to be helpful, or are we going to have to get mediaeval on you?”

“He will do worse to me than that,” the vampire said. It looked at Faith, slitted yellow eyes malevolent. “You cannot conceive of what is coming, Slayer.” It had lowered his voice to a gutteral whisper, a harsh rustling of leaves amidst the dust of the dead. “You cannot conceive what has been done in your name, for your sake. And it will all be for nothing. He is coming.”

“He?”

The yellow eyes flickered out into the darkness. A smile of triumph touched its lips as something whistled through the air, plunging down towards the ground and hitting it with a clang.

Startled, Wesley jerked back, pulling his sword from the vampire as it exploded into dust.

He glared at the boy, “What do you think you’re doing?” It was the slender fighter who’d beheaded the vampire, standing coolly in the church nave, facing Wesley.

“He wouldn’t have given you any information you wanted,” the boy said, insolent, for all that he looked a good dozen years Wesley’s junior.

“You can’t know that,” Wesley snapped. “And you just lost us our best source of information.”

The kid shrugged as if he could care less, “I killed a vampire. Deal with it.” He turned away.

Incensed by the boy’s indifference, Wesley caught his arm, pulling him around to face him, only to have the boy jerk away, pulling himself free with a powerful strength. “Who are you, anyway?”

A scornful look was his only answer, blue eyes contemptuous as they surveyed him, then over to Fred where she stood with Gunn beside Angel, then across to Faith.

Faith, who was swaying on her feet, looking as though she was about to collapse.

Wesley felt his heart leap as she folded up, and all thought of vampires, interrogations, or reckless adolescents vanished as he dropped the sword and caught her before she fell down.

As his arms closed around her, he realised her skin was clammy to the touch. There was no strength in her arms as she pushed at him in protest. “’m fine.”

“Of course you are,” he said sardonically. He let her go, and she wobbled for a moment before he hooked an arm around her back. “See?”

She glared at him, but the expression had no strength to it and her shoulders sagged. “Just tired,” she admitted.

“Exhausted is probably more like it.”

Dark eyes studied him, disconcertingly close. “And when did you start playing mother hen, Wes?”

“Probably around the time you started hanging around with these vampires,” he said, in all seriousness, indicating the church around them.

He didn’t get an answer. She’d shut her eyes and leaned her head back on his shoulder. At first, he thought she was asleep, then, as her body became deadweight, he realised otherwise. After what had probably been a torturous couple of days, Faith the vampire slayer was unconscious.

“Is she okay?” Gunn asked, appearing out of the darkness, breathing as thought he’d just been for a run.

Wesley checked her pulse. Still there and strong. “Probably just tired.” He glanced around, already knowing what he’d find. An empty church full of dust and dead bodies, and Angel, Fred, Gunn, Faith, and himself. The young fighter who’d killed the vampire was gone. “Did you see which way that boy went?”

Gunn shook his head. “He took off when you went to Faith. I tried to follow him, but the kid is fast.”

Wesley nodded, remembering the way the kid had fought. “Fred? How’s Angel?”

She looked up from where she was kneeling beside the downed vampire. “Well, he’s still undead, which is a start. But I don’t know how long he’s going to be out.”

“Any human survivors?”

“No,” she answered, evenly. “They’re all dead.” And although it wasn’t meant as a reproof, he felt the sting in her demeanour.

Gunn picked up the sword Wesley had dropped earlier. “The next question is ‘What do we do about them?’” He made a slashing motion across his throat with his hand, and Wesley felt an uncomfortable pang at the memory of beheading Lilah.

“We’ll have to,” he said.

“I’ll do it,” Gunn told him. “There’s only about a dozen of them, most of the people got out. We’ll call the cops once we’re well away from here.” He hefted the sword and walked over to the first corpse.

Wesley looked away as the sword swung down. He glance alighted on Fred, who flinched as the first clang sounded. Grisly work, but necessary.

Like the interrogation.

He adjusted his hold on Faith and watched Fred as she tended to Angel. Once again, he was struck by the incongruity of her presence in this church full of vampire dust and dead people. Fred wasn’t made for this kind of life. Faith had been called to it, Gunn had been born to it, Angel had chosen it, and Wesley had trained in it.

Fred had fallen into it.

And, although the passing of three years meant growth and change and adjustment, Wesley could never quite shake the feeling that Fred would have been better off elsewhere, doing something else with her scientific brilliance. At Wolfram and Hart, she was approaching that potential, but still...

He never said anything to her, but the feeling lurked in the background nevertheless.

Gunn’s methodical beheadings continued in the background as Fred busied herself with Angel, and Wesley looked down at the girl leaning heavily against him.

She was thin, almost skeletal. He wondered how long she’d been a prisoner. He wondered how long she’d been in LA.

He wondered how long she was going to stay.

“Will she be okay?” Fred asked, standing up and indicating Faith.

“I think so,” Wesley answered. Slayers were made physically strong; she’d recover from her mistreatment in a couple of days. Emotional scars... Wesley chose to avoid thinking about those too closely. The awareness that more than a few of her internal scars bore his fingerprints on them made such thoughts uncomfortable. The memory of what she’d done in ‘repayment’ for them was equally discomforting. “She’ll be up and about in a couple of days.”

“She’s alive, anyway,” Fred murmured. “It’s more than we thought a couple of days ago.”

Wesley’s answer to that was forestalled as Gunn came up. His expression was grim after the macabre task he’d just performed, but no more than he’d been when Wesley had first met him. “We ready to go?”

“Can you shoulder Angel?”

Gunn could.

They went.

\----

As he drove home in the evening twilight, Angel wondered.

Mostly, he wondered about his son.

From the moment he woke up two days ago, still sporting a headache from the plank of wood that had made intimate acquaintance with his skull, Connor had never been far from his thoughts.

That night, he’d only glimpsed his son, sword in hand, fighting vampires as though the last three months had never happened and Connor was just one more of their gang. Something in Angel had lurched at the sight and his attention had wavered from his opponents.

The next night, he’d gone back to the empty, hollow church, trying to confirm the scattered fragments of his memories. Connor’s scent still lingered there, although now it was mere traces in the dust and ash of the vaulted building. His memory was good, he had not been seeing things.

Angel had stopped at his son’s university campus and tracked Connor down.

In the chilling autumn night, he found Connor exactly where the young man was supposed to be. The bar was noisy with the crash and bang of the band, and full of milling students. Connor stood among his friends, drinking soda without a care in the world beyond partying and chatting up the girl who stood under his arm. A typical teenaged boy.

Connor was where he was supposed to be.

So why had he been at the church the other night?

The others hardly remembered Connor’s presence at the church. And Wolfram and Hart’s Senior Partners had done their work well. They didn’t remember Connor as _Connor_ \- just as a strange boy who’d turned up and interrupted Wesley before he could get any useful information out of the vampire.

There were no answers for his questions about Connor, and he was having little more luck with Faith.

The young woman had spent most of the last two days asleep. Probably recovering from her ordeal, although Angel could conceive that it might be an avoidance tactic of some kind.

Fred called his office today at lunchtime, with the news that Faith was up and about the house. “She seems okay,” the young woman said, nervously. “Of course, I don’t know what she’s usually like, but...she seems very quiet. Or maybe she just doesn’t want to talk to me.”

Angel couldn’t say one way or the other, but he reassured Fred anyway.

He drove down the cul-de-sac of palatial homes, and as he approached, the gates of the estate swung open. He slipped the car through before the gates were fully open, carefully judging the space either side of the car, and a minute later he was down in the garage, parking the Mustang among the plethora of other cars that were a part of his ‘perks’ as the CEO of Wolfram and Hart.

As he closed the access door behind him and started up the stairs, Angel wondered if Faith was still at the house, or if she’d fled. Being Faith, she might very well have decided to move on, and Angel still didn’t know what had brought her to LA.

Halfway up the stairs, he went into his rooms and dumped the things he’d brought back from the office. He changed from his work suit to a more comfortable shirt and slacks, before continuing up the stairs to the main body of the house. Strains of Beethoven’s stormy Fifth Symphony caressed his ears; Wesley’s choice of music was dark and moody, and as he reached the lobby, Angel realised why.

Two people had argued here, their voices raising in protest and recrimination. Their emotion had given their scents potency, and the sense of their disagreement lingered on. Angel winced at the bitter taste of Fred’s disappointment, at the cold ash of Wes’ withdrawl.

He couldn’t say he was surprised; this storm had been a while coming. But the fallout from it... Well, Angel wasn’t good enough to predict that, nor fool enough to try.

The ghostly tatters of slow-fading emotion clung to him as he walked through them and into the living room. Wesley sat on the couch amidst a flutter of translation notes.

“Anything interesting?” Angel asked, more out of politeness than actual concern.

Wesley looked up, “It would depend on whether you find Ancient Thynixol texts interesting.”

“No, then.”

“No.”

“Is Faith still around?”

At least Wesley knew him well enough not to be offended at the lack of small talk. Angel felt a pang of loss as he remembered Cordelia berating him for his refusal to ‘make nice’ to clients and other people she deemed important back in the early days of Angel Investigations.

“She’s upstairs,” Wesley said. Then, as Angel nodded and turned on his heel to go upstairs, he added, “Actually, she’s on the roof.”

Angel turned back. “On the roof?”

“Yes.” The former Watcher’s expression held an element of exasperation in it. “She’s been there since before I arrived home.”

“What’s she doing on the roof?”

Wesley sat back in his couch. “I’d say she’s looking for specific company,” he surmised. “You’re the only one of us who can easily get up there, and even then, you’d only go out there after the sun has set.” He glanced back down at his notes as if the topic was dismissed, but Angel could feel his irritation at Faith’s reluctance to speak with him.

It seemed that Angel would be the first one to really talk to Faith about where she’d been these last few months.

Maybe that was just as well.

He found her sitting on the apex of the roof, staring out over the valley in crepuscular twilight.

As he drew level with her on the tiling, she didn’t move, didn’t speak, didn’t look away from whatever held her attention in the evening breeze. So Angel took his place on the roof beside her, but let the silence sit at her convenience.

The valley was a midnight blanket of sparkles beneath them before she spoke. The evening breeze had picked up, blowing across the roof and dragging her long, dark hair with it.

“I thought you guys were dead.” She turned her head, and the pale oval of her face was clearly visible beneath the wasted crescent of the desert moon. “I went to the Hyperion and it was empty.”

“We moved out shortly after we took control of Wolfram and Hart.”

“Fred said.” The dark eyes studied him, “So how’s the world of corporate evil going?”

He shrugged, “Slowly converting to corporate good.”

“ _Is_ there such a thing as corporate good?”

“We’re working on it.” He met her gaze, studying her, willing to be studied in return.

Angel had a specific interest in Faith.

For the redemption of one tormented, haunted girl, he’d defied Buffy Summers, Cordelia Chase, and Wesley Wyndham-Pryce in one fell swoop. In payment for his act of mercy, she’d hunted Angelus down so Angel could regain his soul and regain his life.

Turn and turn about, mirrored reflections and camera angles; Angel saw his own self in Faith, seeking redemption, finding only distrust. He’d been lucky enough to win Buffy’s trust, but Faith had been on the outside in Buffy’s circle.

Angel had been determined that she didn’t need to be on the outside to him, even if Wesley and Cordelia seemed determined to tar and feather her. So he’d visited her in prison, given her a connection to the outside world, made sure she knew one person cared about her.

He’d never seen her like this.

Now, she was cloaked in a weariness that was at odds with everything Angel had ever seen in her. Even at the edge of desperation, Faith always possessed a knife-edged passion that cut through cloaking obfuscations and went straight to the bone.

That passion was missing now. Without it, her customary technicolour vivacity was a mere smear of grey.

“What are you going to do now?”

She shrugged.

It seemed that this was all the answer he was going to get to that question right now. Possibly, it was all the answer she had for him.

It wasn’t the answer he wanted.

And it wasn’t the question he really wanted to ask, either. He really wanted to ask about Connor, why his son had been there, whether Faith knew him and did she remember him?

He didn’t. Not yet. Soon, but not yet.

Angel didn’t know what had brought her to LA, and his senses told him now was not the time to talk about it. It would come from her in time. And all he needed was her time.

So he made the offer. “You’re more than welcome to stay here for as long as you’re in LA.”

She snorted, half-amused at some thought she chose not to share with him. “You sure about that?”

“Yes.”

The amusement leached from her, leaving her dark like the night. Her gaze turned back out over the city. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.” It was an admission of uncertainty, and, in that uncertainty, one of trust.

Angel was warmed by the trust, but he wondered how far it would extend. “Will you stay until you do?”

The answer was a long time coming, until he wondered if she would even answer it at all.

“Yeah.” Her voice was a whisper, barely audible in the evening stillness. “I’ll stay. For a while.”

It was answer enough.

They sat there, on the roof, together; staring out over the bright, barbarous city.

**Author's Note:**

> I started this as an 8-story series, but have neither the time, nor the ability to finish all 8 parts. Since Angel and Buffy finished, I have little inclination to write in these fandoms, for which I am sorry. It certainly didn’t help coming late to the fanfic in this area, either.


End file.
